Mather Throws a Block Party

Karl Frey lets people play with his art.

For Interchange, his new exhibit at Mather House’s Three Columns Gallery, Frey painted sixteen landscapes on Lego blocks. He then disassembled them and asked friends to recompose them, thus actively involving the viewers in the process of art-making.

Suddenly, art was participatory, an experience that involves what Frey refers to in his work statement as the “perceptional patterns of the culture.” That culture and its concurrent style is a movement rooted in American pop art that aims to make art accessible to all, an ideal evident in Frey’s decision to title each painting “The World According to…”

According to Amber Musser, a Mather resident tutor and the curator of the exhibit, Frey has succeeded in bringing art alive for his audience. Viewers so far have been “intrigued about the Legos, had lots of fascination about the technical aspect, and felt they could do it too,” says Musser. These landscapes, in fact, stimulate a sort of childish impulse: you want to take the paintings off the walls and play with them. It is a very peculiar experience in which a toy becomes art and art becomes a game.

The people who actually rearranged the paintings sometimes took this task very seriously, and often felt that there was a “right way to do things,” according to Frey. Some of them were social psychologists, others musicians, all friends of Frey’s and none visual artists, for he feared the latter would put too many of their own ideas into working with his paintings.

The rearrangements of the paintings, almost all of which Frey painted during the summer just for this exhibit, took place during parties he organized. “The reassembling of one landscape took from five to eight hours” he explains, and “because this is a lot to ask of people, I had to feed them and provide entertainment.” The reassemblers worked unassisted. Though all are enthusiastic about the experience, Frey points out that some of them were “ashamed of their final product,” a strange sentiment in light of the compositions’ beauty and uniqueness.

Frey, who is a Cal Poly graduate with an illustration background, turned to landscapes when he saw what he refers to as a “cheesy family painting” that made him want to render them more active. But Frey’s style is hard to pin down: he does work in traditional media like illustration and cartoons but also uses more eccentric forms like painting on canvasses shaped like everyday objects and drawing on stickers rather than in a sketchbook.

Nor is Frey what he calls “just a painter of ideas”—as a young artist skilled in many different areas, his main goal is simply to try out different techniques and define his artistic identity. His website, www.karlfrey.net, provides an interesting visual insight into his varied work, as well as exhaustive work statements that attempt to make as much sense of visual art as possible.

The Three Columns Gallery got its hands on Frey’s work through its external curator, who saw the artist at a show in May. As Musser explains, Frey was excited at the idea of this exhibit because “he likes making art accessible in an interesting space that is always open.” At Mather, exhibits rotate once a month, but this idea will linger for a while: curators are already considering a similar display that will involve abstract painting and Velcro that can be moved around. Perhaps this would be the next step in an ambitious transformation of the Three Columns Gallery into art’s future playground. Regardless, Frey’s paintings make the space well worth a walk down the river even now.

Interchange will be at the Mather Three Columns Gallery through November 21.