Art / MaDora Frey

From the artist

:: Account ::

The ten­u­ous rela­tion­ship that exists between what is usu­al­ly con­sid­ered nat­ur­al ver­sus that which is arti­fi­cial and the sub­se­quent syn­the­sis of these ele­ments are ongo­ing explo­rations in my work.

In the visu­al arts, “Nature” is most often depict­ed as that which is untouched by the hand of man. My work extends the def­i­n­i­tion of NATURE to all things, includ­ing the man-made world, and con­se­quent­ly regards it with the same sense of won­der­ment. Work­ing in series in a wide range of media from pho­tog­ra­phy to kinet­ic sculp­ture, var­i­ous hybrids of this syn­the­sis and won­der­ment are cre­at­ed in my work. The approach might be iden­ti­fy­ing and employ­ing shared phys­i­cal and visu­al pat­terns, as with the machine series. Or it may result from com­bin­ing a mechanical/systematic approach with organ­ic materials.

The images fea­tured were cre­at­ed using liq­uid graphite and a plas­tic com­pos­ite paper. Visu­al­ly and mate­ri­al­ly, they con­flate the lan­guage of pho­tog­ra­phy, draw­ing, and paint­ing. To avoid con­trol­ling the image too much, brush­es are rarely used. When the graphite pud­dles, it appears reflective—capitalizing on its min­er­al qual­i­ties. When watered down, it crawls across a sur­face, sep­a­rat­ing and leav­ing behind inci­den­tal pat­terns. By allow­ing the mate­ri­als to move freely and col­lab­o­rate with one anoth­er, these images, sug­ges­tive of nascent land­scapes or aer­i­al per­spec­tives, can almost be seen to gen­er­ate themselves.

Orig­i­nal­ly from the South­ern U.S., MaDo­ra Frey is a mul­ti-media artist and cura­tor work­ing in New York City. Her cur­rent work takes the form of kinet­ic sculp­tures, and works on paper in var­i­ous media. Frey has exhib­it­ed both domes­ti­cal­ly and inter­na­tion­al­ly with solo shows in Seat­tle, Wash­ing­ton and New York City. She stud­ied at the Flo­rence Acad­e­my, Flo­rence, Italy and received her MFA, magna cum laude, from the New York Acad­e­my of Art. Her work is held in numer­ous pri­vate collections.