MaDora Frey mines the power of the landscape in her site specific installations. In this exhibition, Frey returns to the land she grew up on and the defining feature of her family’s home: a deep, spring-fed pond in the cavity of a former granite quarry.

Frey’s direct interactions with the landscape is evidenced through photographs. The resulting images often appear in her multi-sensory indoor installations alongside hefty piles of granite rock. Materials gathered on location, such as sun-bleached wood, bone, and stone, are co-mingled with manufactured materials like mirrors and dichroic glass. In the gallery, the inactive quarries act as a backdrop to a video installation that, projected on raw canvas, recalls the dips and crags of the landscape. The visual effect is fracturing and mesmerizing as Frey contends with the organic and the human-made.

Frey sees her work as an extension of landscape painting. Plein Air painters of the 19th century took their practice out-of-doors to gain a more direct experience of their subject. Similarly, Frey is onsite responding to the sensory dimensions of the environment at a particular moment. In Plein Air offers an unfolding impression of the artist’s experience and attachment to a familial site. Frey’s exhibition embraces the intertwining of humans and nature and returns us to the artist’s search for the sublime.