VAP 2020-Q4
AKA the green screen, hand drawn, social video, purchase-in-app, self portrait, meme fan, art historical satirical animations of artist Beth Frey.
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As part of a multi-disciplinary practice, Beth Frey makes touchingly self-deprecating and playful videos that are highly relevant reflections of our uncertain and stressful times. These videos are situated at the intersection of drawing, augmented reality, selfie culture, and green screen animation, made and distributed through social media apps like Instagram and Snapchat.
I first encountered Beth and her video work through the fleeting format of Instagram Stories. At the time, she was living and working in Mexico City, just before the global spread of COVID-19. What began as standard selfie content quickly evolved into something more peculiar and compelling. Her stories became a rotating collage of sly performances, overlaid with her saccharine yet sharp watercolor and digital drawings. There was a strange precision to the absurdity. One moment she was referencing viral internet fluff like “woman yelling at cat,” the next she was reframing art history heavyweights such as Las Meninas with a sideways glance and a sly gesture. I was amused, impressed, and increasingly intrigued. I wanted to know more, so I reached out to her for an interview with Vantage Art Projects.
Although Beth’s Instagram following grew rapidly during the early months of 2020, her exploration into video art had already begun several years earlier. She describes the work as unfolding in two distinct chapters, a timeline shaped as much by instinct as by disruption.
The first chapter began in 2017 during a residency at Struts and Faucet in Sackville, New Brunswick. Beth entered the residency knowing that that she wanted to move into video. She began shifting away from her usual drawing and painting practice, leaning into performance and production. The videos she made at Struts and Faucet featured herself as the sole performer. There were surrealist elements already at play, though they lacked the layered augmented chaos that defines her later work.
After the residency, she took a brief pause. She travelled around the East Coast, couchsurfing in a stranger’s apartment and experimenting with Instagram Stories in between borrowed beds. It was during this time that she discovered the “sticker” function—a tool that allowed her to photograph parts of her body and reinsert them into the moving image. A finger might become a nose. An eye, a puppet. She began to make short videos that were uncanny, bodily, and slightly grotesque. These early experiments can still be found on her Instagram under the handle @bf_selfiehouse.
After a few months, the limitations of the platform began to chafe. The sticker tool could only take her so far. Glitches in the app interrupted her more intuitive impulses. It became clear that she was no longer satisfied with manipulating her image from the outside. She wanted to go further. She wanted to inhabit the drawings. To become the artwork itself.
The second chapter began in late 2019, which also happens to be around the time I started watching her Instagram stories with increasing interest. By then, Beth was back in Mexico City, returning to video with renewed focus. She began working with green screen and layering apps, folding her watercolour works into the frame through background and foreground swapping features. The result was a strange kind of puppetry, a morphing of the flat and the filmed, where her paintings became not just scenery but collaborators.
Then March 2020 arrived. The pandemic hit, and Beth left Mexico City abruptly, landing back in Nanaimo, British Columbia, in her mother’s apartment. The shift was stark. Her usual practice—meticulous, slow-burning watercolours—felt impossible amid the anxiety and claustrophobia of that early lockdown. Social media apps, by contrast, offered immediacy and play. She cleared space in the kitchen, pinned up a green screen, added a few more apps to her phone, and got back to work. The videos that emerged, now familiar to anyone following @bf_selfiehouse or @bethisms, were born out of that strange domestic limbo. They are part coping mechanism, part performance, part winking reclamation of the home as a site of absurd invention.
Humour, parody, and exaggeration run through all of Beth’s work, not just the social videos. Beneath the saturated colours and comedic timing, there is often something more uncomfortable at play. Shame, embarrassment, and the ever-present spectre of cringe surface again and again. Her practice does not shy away from bodily functions or the grotesque. It embraces them, often with a knowing smirk. Consider A Costume for Peeing in Lakes (2013), a piece that leans into the abject with unapologetic glee. Or Reimagining Yesterday’s Conversation (and sounding so much cooler) (2019), where insecurity is replayed through the filter of hindsight and performance. These works resist polish. They prefer to squirm.
Artworks referenced can be seen below.
Humour has always come naturally to Beth, especially when it comes to self-representation. She admits that self-deprecating humour is, for her, both a coping mechanism and a way of decoding the contradictions of daily life. It allows her to disarm, to expose, to slip between sincerity and satire without getting stuck in either. This reflexive approach makes it possible for Beth to hold a mirror to the world while also turning that mirror back on herself. The laugh, in her work, is rarely just a punchline. It is often the entry point for something more revealing.
I asked Beth whether the pandemic, particularly those increasingly isolating days in Mexico before she returned to Canada, had shaped the content of her videos. She told me that some of the earliest green screen works—those made before she began integrating her drawings—featured two versions of herself within the same frame. It was an intuitive response to isolation, a kind of visual mantra for “be your own best friend.” She was thinking about distance. About the physical separations imposed by the pandemic and the emotional flatness that followed the disappearance of everyday touch. Doubling herself on screen became a way to simulate presence, to conjure an echo of connection. The process felt therapeutic, she said. A kind of invented intimacy where the absence of others could be momentarily filled by a spectral version of herself.
Beth has been drawing for most of her life. It is the backbone of her studio practice, a language she knows intuitively. Digital video, by contrast, is still a relatively new terrain for her, though she approaches it with the same instinctive fluency. The videos bring together her drawing-based practice and what could be described as a selfie practice—an extension of her mark-making, now translated through the lens. For Beth, the act of performing for the camera is not separate from drawing but continuous with it. When I asked her how she sees the work in relation to film or animation, she offered a simple but telling phrase. She calls it a “moving drawing.” It is not cinema. It is not quite animation. It is a drawing that breathes.
These moving drawings are also performances, and in them Beth plays, if not the only character, then all of them. I asked her how she sees performance in relation to her character-driven portraiture. While her work has long circled the terrain of self-representation—and she believes, rightly, that most art is a form of self-portraiture—she never quite thought of performance as part of her practice. At least not explicitly.
In hindsight, a 2018 series seems like a precursor to her current use of face-swapping apps. In those earlier works, she used a cut-and-paste method to integrate her own image into the drawings. The result was intentionally off-kilter. Her face never quite aligned with the rest of the composition, creating a visual dissonance that underscored the instability of identity.
She also shared a story from her MFA thesis defense. The gallery was filled with meticulously installed drawings and sculptures. But the work that unexpectedly captured the jury’s attention was a simple webcam selfie included in her PowerPoint. It was not part of the exhibition, just a slide. The reaction was disproportionate and unanticipated. The committee loved it. It was, in that moment, a quiet rupture. A clue that the offhand image—the one meant as a footnote—held something raw and worth returning to.
Frey is still wrestling with how these videos fit into the rest of her practice. Her body of work spans drawing, painting, installation, and three-dimensional forms, and for a long time she did not see the videos as part of that continuum. They felt more like something she did for fun on social media, a creative outlet rather than a formal extension of her studio work. As someone new to video art, she was also unsure how the pieces might live beyond the app, outside the feed.
That hesitation is starting to shift. The videos are beginning to stand on their own, with enough conceptual weight and visual logic to hold space alongside her other work. More than that, they are starting to bleed back into her drawings. Self-representation and visual cues from social media are creeping into her 2D works. She is also thinking about how to connect drawing and video more deliberately, through character creation and world-building. The figures that appear in her videos may soon find a parallel life on paper, or vice versa. She is also considering longer formats, no longer bound by the structural constraints of the platform.
Distribution remains an open question. The silver lining of the pandemic, she notes, is the normalization of online viewing. For video artists, this has opened up pragmatic and immediate pathways to audience. Yet she still feels tied to the gallery. The white cube, for all its institutional baggage, remains a space where physical presence matters. Beth imagines the videos presented alongside drawings in a more traditional installation, perhaps projected or perhaps remaining in their native format on a small screen. For now, though, and for your immediate viewing pleasure, we have embedded a few of our favourites here.
About the artist: Beth Frey was born in Calgary, Alberta, and raised and schooled on Vancouver Island, BC, Beth Frey now divides her time between Montreal and Mexico City, where she creates drawings, videos, and sculptures. Frey uses an absurdist sense of humour and an element of play to approach her subjects, be it girlhood, the body, social media, and that foreboding sensation that the apocalypse is like, really really near. She has an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University, and a BFA from the University of Victoria. Frey has shown across Canada as well as in Mexico, the US, and Morocco. Her website is: www.bethfrey.com and her Instagram profile is: @bf_selfiehouse.
About the writer: Jennifer Mawby is a contemporary artist and sometimes curator and art writer with a focus on projects for artists using accessible language. Jennifer is the co-founder and director of Vantage Art Projects. Her work can be found here: www.jjtmstudio.com and on Instagram: @jenniferjeanmawby.