Petra Cortright | Verse
Petra Cortright, Bridal Shower, 2013 (video still)
A conversation between artist Petra Cortright and Leyla Fakhr, Artie Handz, Jamie Gourlay and Ivan Zhyzhkevych
“Yeah, I’ve always been super interested in it and growing up on the internet, you learn to speak in a certain way. Even like, you know, something as simple as like you said capitalization, it's more casual to speak in all lowercase, and that's what I prefer. I still write emails to this day in all lowercase. Like I refuse to give in to that level of professionalism, unless it's something to do with my son's school as I don't want to seem like a crazy person. But other than that, if it's just on me, I usually come across as the voice is different.
All the titles of my paintings, they kind of come from these SEO lists. I don't remember a single title of a painting, not a single one, because they're really crazy. And also growing up on the internet, different websites had different acceptable ways of speaking and early YouTube was really rough. Not as rough as forums, I mean, depending on which forum, but there are levels of banter that I really appreciate and there's this kind of thing to like give someone a hard time, but like everyone knows you’re just having a laugh. So although I've had such a hard time, I think like the last decade with all the wokeness that’s creeped into everything and people getting banned for this or that, I think it's so silly.
I've just been really interested in the way that people speak online and I've really enjoyed it. But that is what got me in trouble with the keywords that I put on the videos because there's a lot of really, really bad words in there. People accuse me of profiting off of racism and all this, but it's like, you single out and cherry pick certain things from this big list of everything, especially these words that are really supposed to provoke a reaction, but then there's other stuff in there, it’s everything. I don't know, I'm really, very interested in it. Everything in my work always has a lot to do with internet language.” — Petra Cortright