AUTOEFFIGIES
Beth Frey
November 6 – December 20, 2025
Opening November 6
From 4 to 8 PM
Artist in attendance
McBride Contemporain is delighted to present Autoeffigies, the most comprehensive solo exhibition to date of Canadian artist Beth Frey, returning to Montreal after several years of international success. For Autoeffigies, Frey delivers a semi-autobiographical narrative through a suite of new works: after riding the early wave of AI image-making to viral fame, she returns to drawing, reclaiming a tactile language through the integration of machine-generated imagery. Filled not with machine hallucinations, but very human ones, this exhibition brings together complex drawings, recent videos, and a growing set of small sketches that will be added to throughout the run.
At first glance, the drawings appear gestural and immediate, but in fact they are meticulous. The works emerge through an iterative exchange between machine and hand. Frey moves between AI-generated images and blind contour drawings, translating and reworking them in watercolour and pencil. With every pass, new distortions and echoes emerge, layering gesture with algorithm. Her use of masking fluid lends the drawings the faint bevel and glow of early digital filters. The resulting surfaces are alive and unsteady, carrying the residue of their making rather than concealing it. These surfaces privilege process over polish, allowing the construction of the image to remain visible, tactile.
Several video works extend this language further, turning drawing into performance. Frey uses her own body to inhabit her watercolours, collaging filmed performance with drawn linework through use of a green screen, as if stepping into the drawing itself. Their cartoonish energy mirrors the tactility of the drawings. Here too, the body reasserts itself—stitched into the image, leaving traces of a lived body within the digital space.
A clear through line is visible in Frey’s work: funny, sexy, bulbous bodies – bright colours and dark themes. They dance in space with multiple layers, sensual if not totally sexual, rough where AI aims to be smooth. Here, Frey employs the genre of self-portraiture as a trope. Her avatars, blond-haired and button-nosed, are feminine and cute, but also perverse and monstrous.
This mythological imagery surfaces subtly here: Faust (who trades his soul for forbidden knowledge), Frankenstein (who brings to life, then loses control of an artificial creature), and Pygmalion (who falls under the spell of his own creation) echo the artist’s shifting relationship with generative technology. Against the hyperreal, frictionless regime of digital imagery, Frey knowingly uses tactile materials, rough sketches, cheap props, and outdated tools. Here, instead, she offers very human qualities: the texture of error, the warmth of imperfection. Where AI polishes away the body, she presses it back in.
Text by Mikhel Proulx
Beth Frey (b. 1980, Calgary, Alberta) holds a Master of Fine Arts in Painting & Drawing from Concordia University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from University of Victoria. She has exhibited widely in solo exhibitions across Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Mexico. Her work has also been included in significant group exhibitions, including the Museo Cabañas in Guadalajara, Mexico; the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt, New Zealand; the Musée d’art de Joliette. Her collaborations with the experimental voice collective Phth has been a part of the 2024 Femsa Biennale in Guanajuato, Mexico, and at the Société des Arts Technologiques in Montreal in 2025.