Petra Cortright
borderline auroa boreals | Team Gallery
March 5th 2020 – April 11th 2020
Petra Cortright, Installation View at Team Gallery, 2020
For her first solo exhibition at team, Petra Cortright will use the gallery’s main room to realize an ambitious installation that expands the layers of a digital landscape painting into physical space. The painting’s hundreds of layers, individual and combined, are printed on industrial translucent substrates hung at intervals throughout the space, with pathways through and along the installation that introduce new and ever-expanding opportunities for composition to emerge. Cortright’s brand of landscape is chaotic, beautiful, and volatile, marked by abstraction and populated by jagged .jpg shards and swift blossoms of painterly brushwork; working with a pace and agility the digital methods at her disposal afford, the entanglement of mark-making, color, and texture can assume an almost synesthetic effect.
Cortright operates within the vernacular of landscape painting but outside of its classical means and materials, questioning how the haptic and lyrical might be laced within consumer technology, spam-text poetry, and files chosen not in defense of the poor image but in celebration of it. Her painting software of choice is, of course, Photoshop, and her works mine the expressive and unintended potential of its transformations, effects, and malleability.