The next Artist You Need To Know is Mary Frey.
She is an American photographer and educator who lives in western Massachusetts. Frey’s photographs play with the notion of reality and our expectations of photography, as she often depicts seemingly banal scenes of middle class lives (employing immediate family, friends and even strangers) that mimic documentary but actually challenge “the nature of the documentary image in contemporary culture.” (the words of the artist)
‘By paying attention to quotidian moments, photographs manifest their own truths. As a result, the meaning of events may shift, slip or change as one experiences images. Such is the case with our lives as we are forced to examine where we have come from and where we are going.’
The images below are from her series Family, Friends & Strangers (2002 – present).
Frey graduated from Yale University School of Art with an MFA in 1979 : she would almost immediately begin teaching at the Hartford Art School, becoming an important and defining teacher in that space until her retirement in 2015.
She has been recognized with many awards : these include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1984), two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1980 and 1992, respectively), a Te Foundation Fellowship (2004) and a major grant from the John Anson Kitteredge Fund (2010) Frey was also the Harnish Visiting Artist at Smith College (Northampton, MA) in 1994 – 95 and in 2001 was the artist in residence at Burren College of Art in County Clare in Ireland.
The images below are from the series Real Life Dramas (1984-87). Frey offers the following about these images : “These photographs, which appear to be documentary, are entirely preconceived and set-up. Their appearance is meant to hover somewhere between reality and soap opera in order to question the “truth” of the camera’s vision. The texts, which are photographically generated and printed in the white space of the images, appropriate the language of popular dime store fiction and are oftentimes overblown or irrelevant. Their function is never quite clear and is chiefly meant to be a fulcrum around which to operate a series of ideas.”
Her work has been exhibited extensively and is part of many public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Chicago Art Institute and the International Polaroid Collection.
A more extensive listing of her exhibitions and accomplishments can be seen here.
The artworks below are from Frey’s series Imagining Fauna : a series of black glass ambrotypes (2008-11). She offers the following about this body of work : “Photography invites us to pay attention. It describes with economy, precision and detail. It enables us to stare, scrutinize, and become voyeurs. Taxidermy allows us to do the same. Its complete replication of an animal’s stance, gesture and look provides us a way to study and comprehend its existence. Yet I find that these animals, often portrayed in suspended animation, seem simultaneously strange, ghostly and beautiful. Their gaze is both familiar and unknown. I intend this work to move beyond what is merely seen to the territory of the imagination, where what is remembered and known is transformed into something new.”
Frey’s process often questions and challenges assumptions made about photography, both in contemporary spaces but also historically.
The images below are from the series Domestic Rituals (1979-83). Frey’s words : “This project grew out of my fascination with the snapshot as a vessel for, and shaper of memory, and my abiding interest in the straight photograph as a seemingly truthful and precise record of an event.”
More about Frey’s aesthetic – and much more of her artwork – can be seen at her site.