Petra Cortright | Untitled
by Meka Boyle
When Petra Cortright’s life was upended early this year due to Los Angeles’ fires, she found an outlet in her work, and—for the first time—curating. Now in Miami Beach, for Untitled Art’s Artist Spotlight sector, she debuts a selection of artists, many working on new digital frontiers or outside the fringes of the art world.
When we meet ahead of the fair, Petra Cortright leads me to the back of a green, tree-lined courtyard in the Simchowitz Gallery's Hill House in Pasadena, where she’s preparing her curatorial debut for Untitled Art’s Artist Spotlight initiative. It’s mid-November, but summer in Los Angeles fades slowly, and today offers the final remnants before weeks of rain. She is dressed in a loose white T-shirt and jeans, bare-faced save for a swipe of mascara, her long, light brown hair still air-drying in the sun—her face unobscured now by the sunglasses, red lipstick, and glitchy webcam effects that marked her early video art days. She sits across from me with her laptop open, scrolling for references of the artists that she has selected. “Everyone knows that the Internet has been the biggest change in our world over the past 30 years, so it's so weird to me that the art world has been slow to adopt it,” says the artist, who sees her position as an opportunity to hold a mirror to the world.
The relationship between art and digital mediums has long been framed as a charged one, but Cortright sees this way of thinking as counter-intuitive in a world where screens invade virtually everyone’s day-to-day life. “I'm always pretty quick to reject any kind of black-and-white or good-and-evil thinking. It’s not helpful in art, and it's not helpful in life,” she says. “I'm much more interested in what happens in the netherworld in-between.” Over the years, she has kept track of the artists who share her sentiment. Now many appear in her spotlight section.