Montage: Unmonumental Online
Digital material is never natural. It iseither generated or repurposed, and
always pre-inscribed with meaning. It settles in sediments, turning the Web
into a veritable billboard land: a frenetic free market in which corporations, private citizens, and fictional conglomerates all wave their own signs. It is a landscape rich with fiction, contradictions, and disjuncture. The new quickly becomes obsolete, and the old is continually revived. Internet-based montage, the assemblage of distinct materials into a new whole, is therefore both an inevitable and perpetual accident and an emerging, illuminating art form....
Montage is the final exhibition in Unmonumental: the Object in the
21st Century at the New Museum
of Contemporary Art.
Launch Project 
Landscape 5/15/05 (2005)
Originally from Southern California, the work of Petra Cortright is deeply influenced by an appreciation of plants, animals, and ecosystems. Her projects often attempt to reconcile the visual language of computers (software interfaces, ASCII code, animated gifs, and instant messaging idioms) with the rhetoric of the "natural image." In Landscape 5/15/05 (2005), Cortright pastes together layers of outdoor photos in an image that makes "use of repetition originating from itself," meaning that the patterns inherent to each vista determine the overall pattern of the greater visage. The seams between each constituent element are simultaneously obvious and subtle, creating a virtual rupture in the perception of natural space, as the viewer's eye follows the horizon of this fantasized terrain.
Born 1986, Santa Barbara, CA / Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Petra Cortright studies at Parsons School of Design in New York. She is a member of the Nasty Nets Internet Surfing Club.
PROJECT URL:
rhizome.org/cortright
GENERAL URL:
petracortright.com
PROJECT URL:
rhizome.org/cortright
GENERAL URL:
petracortright.com