Beth Frey

Beth Frey explores a variety of media, including drawing, painting, video, sculpture, and installation, employing both wry and absurd humor. Her colourful world – which often integrates representations of herself – blurs the boundaries between the beautiful and the grotesque, the innocent and the twisted. With a formal background in drawing and painting, Frey collaborates with new technologies, such as smartphone apps and AI image-generation tools, to expand her complexly layered watercolour paintings. This approach becomes a form of world-building: an aqueous space where utopian and dystopian elements collide. Drawing from art history, pop culture, and her own visual lexicon, the artist populates these works with "beautiful failures" that challenge expectations of gender and capitalist success, while addressing the anxieties and absurdities of our uncertain times.

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 shows in Canada, US, Mexico, and the UK, as well as a number of group exhibitions, including Museo Cabañas, in Guadalajara, Mexico, the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. Her collaborations with the experimental voice collective Phth has been a part of the 2024 Femsa Biennale in Guanajuato, Mexico, and Festival Montréal/Nouvelles Musiques at the SAT in Montreal in 2025.