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@bbeetthh
Over the past three years, The Daily Program has become a survey of artists exploring new narratives and formal ideas using digital and AI tools.
Beth Frey has been building her absurdist universe for a while. Her background spans painting, drawing, video, sculpture, and installation, with an MFA from Concordia University and a BFA from the University of Victoria, and exhibitions across Canada, Mexico, the UK, and the US. That analog foundation shows up in how she approaches AI tools: with a painter's eye for composition, but a deliberate willingness to let the machine get confused.
A lot of her work starts with the self. Working from a personal bank of images, early AI-generated pieces and studio photographs of herself, Frey feeds disparate, mismatched source material into the generator, intentionally destabilizing its logic to produce something genuinely unsettling. The body becomes both raw material and active player.
Sentient Muppet Factory, which launched as part of the Post Photographic Perspectives II Program back in 2023, is the clearest expression of this. Presented as invented film stills from a time that is both past and future, the series stages Muppet-like figures within compositions that echo Renaissance portraiture, formal arrangements, artificial backgrounds, tangled figurative forms, while filling that sacred visual language with subject matter that is purely kitsch. The cognitive dissonance is the point.
The project wears its references openly. Inspired by Laurie Anderson's use of puppets as an analogy for new technologies, and by the spectacle of The Muppet Show's original late-1970s run, Frey occupies a space where wacky children's television collides with the seriousness of auteur cinema. These generated bodies are abnormal, yet somehow feel at home in their inhabited spaces.
The humor is never decoration. Like her analog work, it's the mechanism through which she draws out contradictions, the beautiful and the grotesque, the innocent and the perverse, the handmade and the mechanized. The "factory" in the title is both a joke and a thesis: AI as industrialized image production, churning out new characters with the efficiency of an assembly line, filtered through the sensibility of a painter who knows exactly how strange that is.
Her contributions to the Post Photographic Perspectives program remain a sharp early marker of what this moment in AI art could look like, irreverent, formally rigorous, and stranger than it first appears.
↓ Here are some pieces from that collection