Beth Frey

Beth Frey works with a variety of media, including drawing, painting, video, sculpture and installation.

Through her wry, absurdist sense of humour, Frey playfully draws out contradictions in her subject matter, blurring the beautiful and the grotesque, the innocent and the perverse, often integrating representations of herself into her chromatic cartoon-like world. Working from her complexly layered watercolours, Frey incorporates accessible smartphone apps and AI image generation tools to expand this universe and bring her body into it as an active player.

Frey has an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University and a BFA from the University of Victoria. She has exhibited her work in a number of solo and group shows across Canada, Mexico, as well as the UK and US. Frey currently divides her time between Montreal and Mexico City.

Frey’s expansion into AI also carries the elements of humour and play inherent in her analogue work. Sentient Muppet Factory, her viral Instagram account, presents invented film stills from a time that is both of the past and future, where wacky children’s television aesthetics overlaps with the seriousness of auteur cinema, and the abnormality of these generated bodies strangely feel “normal” in their inhabited spaces.