Hi, I'm Petra Cortright. I'm an artist based in Los Angeles, California. I'm here in Wellington at City Gallery presenting paintings and webcam videos and flash animations. Almost every brushstroke that you see is on its own separate layer within Photoshop. Each painting is comprised of hundreds and hundreds of layers of brushstrokes.
Every painting in the show comes from one file and all the paintings in the show are versions of one file. I like to work very very quickly. I have no patience for waiting for a paint to dry.
Producing the physical work is very important. I have to work against the fact that digital things can be quite flat. So I like to experiment on the substrates that I use.
I've produced work on linen, on silk, on aluminum, on paper, and I like to experiment with different materials that allow different printing processes or allow more light to reflect off the surface of the work or anything that can kind of help bring some life and light back into the... I'm Aaron Lister and Curator at City Gallery Wellington and I've been working with Petra Courtright on the exhibition running Neo Geo Games Under Mame. Alongside the paintings we also have a live video painting which plays out over 15 minutes, a suite of webcam performances which are broadcast to YouTube, and a new series of desktop screensaver works which are kind of flash animation videos which match together the screensaver with painting traditions. I've been collecting very strange, weird webcam softwares, mostly for Windows-based computers for like 10 years.
And I always have thought of them as self-portraits. I'm kind of like the director, the actor, the editor, everything in one take. Because they're always live, I can see what I'm doing.