Petra Cortright

In Petra Cortright’s site-specific commission for ART on THE MART, Webcam still life with flowers: blue, green, and red, the artist continues an exploration into merging her painting and video practices. 

The work, which as projected across THE MART's 2.5 acre river-façade, blurs the lines between the two using a range of technical and figurative modes key to her work in both fields. The result reflects the incredibly intimate and low-fi approaches in which Cortright works – translated to a grand scale across one of the most iconic architectural pillars in Chicago. 

Petra Cortright is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, painting and digital media. She is largely known for her role in the “Net-Art” movement – a movement that uses the Internet as its primary source – and as a "post-Internet" artist through her use of digital and analog media to explore the aesthetics of online consumption and performance. She first rose to prominence when her 2007 work VVEBCAM – for which she recorded herself on a webcam passively scrolling through different visual effects – was removed by YouTube in 2011. Since then, Cortright has made digital paintings by using Photoshop to manipulate, distort, and “paint” over imagery that she harvests online.