When the World Cup started, my Twitter feed went aflame with chatter about the games, but no one was quite so impassioned as artist PETRA CORTRIGHT. “How do you not finish that,” she tweeted after a botched attack by Iran, followed by, “THESE ECUADORIAN FANS COMING DOWN FROM THEIR CLOUD FOREST TO SHOW SUPPORT,” during the Ecuador game.
Cortright is one of Los Angeles’ most quickly ascending emerging artists. She crashed the scene a few years ago with a series of selfie-style VIDEOS on YouTube that used new video editing technologies. Lately, in addition to her continued video practice, she’s started making paintings in Photoshop and printing them on aluminum, as well as a series of flags made from low-resolution images sourced online. Her show at Steve Turner Contemporary last year was spot on, and a video of her juggling a soccer ball was included in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s show Fútbol: The Beautiful Game, curated by Franklin Sirmans.
Which is to say, she loves soccer enough to include it in her art. Today was a big day for Cortright. The USA was taking on Germany in a critical match in the morning, and Cortright was getting ready for a screening at the MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, Los Angeles in the evening, where she’ll be showing a bunch of her celebrated web videos, as well as premiering an exclusive video she did with MOCAtv.
A lot of Cortright’s tweets include a fluent use of emoji, so it only made sense to do the interview by text message, where we could nimbly air it out about the US squad’s chances in the knockout round, as well as her own playing days. These are the screen grabs.
Petra Cortright’s Tags for Likes premieres Thursday, June 26 at 7PM
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