David Frei (b. 1972, Lubbock, TX) makes images, objects, and situations concerned with attention, time, and encounter.

His work moves between photography, ceramics, drawing, painting, and participatory projects. It often begins with something ordinary: two people drawing one another, a casual photograph, a repeated gesture, an object passed from one person to another. Frei is interested in what becomes visible when attention is sustained.

Some works create simple structures for people to spend time together. Others begin with images or objects that already carry a history. Across the practice, repetition and use allow meaning to accumulate over time.

Recent projects consider the increasingly uncommon experience of sharing unstructured time with another person. Rather than treating participation as spectacle, Frei builds situations in which an encounter can unfold on its own terms. The work does not try to resolve these encounters.

Images and objects often become records of relationships, but also occasions for new ones. A photograph can preserve an encounter, a drawing can mark a period of shared attention, and an object can carry the traces of having moved between people.

Frei studied photography and painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he received the Purchase Award for Photography in his graduating year. He also studied at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. He earned an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Illinois Chicago, where he received a University Fellowship. His studies at UIC included work with Dennis Kowalski, Kerry James Marshall, Tony Tasset, Michelle Grabner, and Michael Smith.

In New York, Frei founded Culturehall and ArtMgt, two artist-centered projects concerned with how contemporary art is presented, circulated, and discovered. He has served as a guest critic for the MFA Photography program at the School of Visual Arts in New York and as a juror for Nurture Art in Brooklyn.