Canada
Canada 1980
Beth Frey works with a variety of media, including drawing, painting, video, 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 to expand this universe and bring her body into it as an active player in her haunting yet playful videos.
In 2022, Frey began to experiment with generative AI tools through her viral Instagram account, Sentient Muppet Factory, which presented invented film stills from a time that is both of the past and future, where wacky children’s television aesthetics overlapped with the seriousness of auteur cinema, celebrating the abnormality of her generated bodies by placing them in everyday contexts. Dissatisfied with the ease of production, this experience led Frey to apply a more critical lens to generative AI. Rather than using it as a tool, she approaches AI as a conceptual problem to investigate through performance, glitch, and (mis)translation.
Frey has an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University and a BFA from the University of Victoria. Recent solo exhibitions include McBride Contemporain (Montreal), mother’s tankstation (London, UK), Galeria Pamoja Weissenberg (Mexico City). Frey has also participated in group shows at Museo Cabañas (Guadalajara), Dowse Museum (Wellington, NZ) and featured at Pictoplasma (Berlin, DE), and Forking Room (Seoul, KR), among others. Her collaboration with the experimental voice collective Phth was performed at the SAT in 2025 and will be transformed into an upcoming exhibition at DRAC in Drummondville, Quebec. Frey currently divides her time between Montreal and Mexico City.
