Using the title of her 2004 photograph, My Mother, My Son, as an inspirational and creative starting point, Mary Frey pulls from her vast archive of photographs to create a pictorial story collapsing linear time. Frey intimately and masterfully captures subjects at ease in environments that feel, at once, wholly familiar yet unmoored from their own reality. Using as its base the intersection of the domestic, the banal and the profoundly common rituals which define our shared humanity, the black and white and color images in My Mother, My Son. present the viewer with something more reminiscent of memory’s elusive imprint. Frey touches upon the mystery of life: the finite ending point of death and the legacies that are left behind. Past and future join together in each present, fleeting moment. With a tipped-in chromogenic print on its cover, My Mother, My Son. stylistically echoes a family album both commemorative and permanent, if only in the story it chooses to present.
