UNTITLED 2020, Miami Art Fair: Booth B11: C O U N T Y, Section 2

Petra Cortright and Corey Mason exemplify two distinct strategies for negotiating analog and digital processes within the context of contemporary art. Both create sensuous, lyrical paintings that preserve traces of the artist's own bodily gestures and actions. However, Cortright uses high-tech production methods while Mason uses traditional methods, and they insert themselves into their work at opposite ends of the production cycle. Cortright paints with a stylus during an initial, pre-fabrication stage, creating an archive of digital brushstrokes that she later re-samples across a series of compositions on anodized aluminum. Mason by contrast, remixes fragments from humanity’s shared archaeological record. Mason’s human/animal hybrids point simultaneously to the Lascaux and Chauvet caves and to Picasso’s Minotaur paintings, while his images of pottery suggest both European and Mesoamerican referents.

Despite their use of materials and techniques, both artists embrace a tradition aesthetic that privileges the pleasures of decoration and manual craft. Both also use recycling to create their multilayered works. For Mason, recycling means appropriation of historically and culturally polyvalent symbols, whereas for Cortright it involves the virtual recycling of digital images and gestures. By placing their works in dialogue with each other, we hope to explore how two twenty-first century artists reconcile the handmade and the industrial within their own distinctive artistic practices while allowing spaces for new kinds of beauty to emerge.