Petra Cortright’s Luminex 3.0 Exhibit

Reflecting on LUMINEX 3.0 Landscape Frequencies: A Weekend of Light and Art in Los Angeles

As the sun set over Los Angeles this past weekend, the city transformed into a stunning canvas of light and creativity, inviting exploration and reflection. LUMINEX 3.0 Landscape Frequencies returned with an exciting twist, showcasing the innovative work of Petra Cortright alongside other talented visual artists. This free public art exhibition engaged audiences through a curated pedicab experience, allowing visitors to traverse vibrant installations that illuminated the urban landscape.

Cortright’s unique approach blends digital media with the physical environment, offering a fresh perspective on the interplay between technology and nature. We had the opportunity to speak with her, delving into her artistic vision and the inspiration behind her captivating work.

Courtesy of the Artist

We The Cool: Tell us about yourself. Who is Petra Cortright? 

Petra: I am an artist and mother of two

WTC: Can you walk us through your process of creating digital paintings? Where do you begin? Do you sketch on paper or is everything digital? 

P: I paint in Photoshop, everything is digital. Almost every brushstroke you see is on its own separate layer. The painting is set up as more of an environment and a large number of versions comes from a single file.  The variations are endless.

WTC: In what ways do you believe your art comments on the intersection of technology, beauty, and society?

P: I'm interested in classic themes in art, landscapes, and self portraits. These are nice things to think about and explore for a whole lifetime and people have been thinking about them for centuries. The way I execute the work is more contemporary but it's part of a very old conversation.  

WTC: What other artists have influenced your work and why?

P: Too many to name, I love landscape paintings of course. I'm really into Felix Vallotton, Nicholas Roerich and Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida at the moment.

WTC: How do you integrate traditional painting influences with contemporary multimedia techniques in your work?

P: I literally “cut up” .jpegs of paintings and collage them into the file

Petra Cortright, Celebrity addresses/fiji firing tour squad, 2017. Digital painting on anodized aluminum, 185.4 x 365.8 cm, © Petra Cortright.

WTC: On October 5, you presented a surrealist landscape at LUMINEX 3.0: Landscape Frequencies in LA. California. Tell us about this project

P: When we first started planning Luminex, there were already Chronicles of Narnia references. I read a lot of children's books; there's a specific reference to the sea of flowers, an aesthetic that's in the film. And yeah, I've been working on this project in very sleep-deprived fragments that almost added a surreal level to it. And maybe it helped actually. I presented a video made with a landscape building software/game on steam. It's sort of a surrealist video based on dreams - there are some references to the children's series by CS Lewis “The Chronicles of Narnia”. There is also a lot of imagery that references some areas where I grew up - specifically the channel islands off the coast of Santa Barbara. The music that accompanies the video was made by my dear friend and very talented musician James Whipple, it's so haunting and perfect.

WTC: What does your creative process look like when developing a new piece for an outdoor exhibition?

P: I think the association is that I've posted things on the internet for the last 20 years. So it's just very active, since I was 15. And that's always been a public platform to me and it's always been put out there for people to see like at times with not a lot of information or not in an art context.

When I first started putting up videos on YouTube, there was very like vague and like odd descriptions of things. It wasn't like, this is a art bubble, it was just nothing, like no information. Yeah, I've always viewed the internet as like a public forum for art and maybe like placing it in unexpected ways or unexpected places. Yeah, putting things where they maybe are not supposed to be.

WTC: Are there any upcoming projects or themes you’re excited to explore after LUMINEX 3.0?

P: I'm in a few group shows this fall in museums which are always nice, LACMA, Torrance Art Museum and MCA Chicago. I have upcoming NFT drops with Verse Solos. other than that I am just working on files like I always do. 

WTC: Our current issue is about perception and you touch a lot of subjects around romance and the idea of romance in your work. What is your perception of romance and how does it influence your artistic expression?

P: I think there can be a romance about the place you grew up in, so I have a lot of romantic views about California and the American West. That imagery, the vastness, the quality of light comes and the specific color palette comes through a lot in the work. 

LUMINEX 3.0: Landscape Frequencies was held on Saturday, October 5, from 7 PM to 11:30 PM. The participating artists included JOJO ABOT, Refik Anadol, Alice Bucknell, Nao Bustamante, Petra Cortright, Marc Horowitz, Carole Kim, Alan Nakagawa, Sarah Rara, and LAVA (Los Angeles Video Artists).

LUMINEX 3.0: Landscape Frequencies brought art and community together in an engaging outdoor exhibition that used buildings as the canvas. The versatility of digital art was explored through high-end multimedia artworks, which were made accessible and free for the public to reframe the city into a cultural landscape. LUMINEX served as a world-class exhibition of renowned artists, offering the opportunity for creative voices to connect with the public at large outside of galleries or museums.

"Luminex was a radical act of urban transformation, cultural access, community building, and artistic expression. Amidst a city characterized by earthquakes and ever-changing architecture, each installation skewed the perception of our world and our position within it. From surrealistic performances and absurdism to explorations of fragility and voyeuristic glimpses into a futuristic dystopian Los Angeles, these media-based works captivated viewers by reframing our actions and destinations. The intersecting concepts among the artworks framed and explored the landscapes of nature, society, and the mind.

Can we recreate our environment, our perception of the world, and ultimately ourselves? The answer lay in our ability to connect, understand, and inspire one another through the transformative power of art. Staged at an architectural scale, Landscape Frequencies destabilized the status quo while inviting audiences to immerse themselves in the worlds created by recognized, cutting-edge artists of Los Angeles.

In my recent conversations with individuals whose lives were touched by art, a harmonized frequency emerged—a true essential vibration of humanity. Our state of perpetual transition and the echoes of instability from recent years shaped our contemporary collective human experience. During this ephemeral one-night exhibition, we paused to ignite a ripple of possibility. How could we, as individuals, match this impact?

In this urban theater of light and sound, we featured works by Alice Bucknell, Marc Horowitz, Petra Cortright, Nao Bustamante, Refik Anadol, LAVA, JOJO Abot, Carole Kim, and Alan Nakagawa. Refik Anadol’s new work, Artificial Realities: California Landscapes, incorporated a raw dataset of 153 million publicly available landscape images of California’s National Parks. Alice Bucknell’s The Alluvials explored the politics of drought and water scarcity in Los Angeles, while Petra Cortright presented surrealist scenes that exuded beauty, optimism, and freedom. Carole Kim’s live performance and projected images dove into memory and the landscape of the mind.

As we navigated through the year, Landscape Frequencies served as a catalyst for inspiration and a deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe.”

– Carmen Zella, Head Curator