Selected Exhibitions
Urban | Remix
2022
Studio Gallery, Washington DC
Duo show with Veronica Szalus
Veronica Szalus and Pam Frederick have once again come together to form a dialog around the urban environment. This time, their exhibiting work is centered around a fluid, continually shifting landscape encapsulated in architecture that is all encompassing of an ever-living pulse from everything and everyone who inhabits it.
Throughout the exhibit, the artists invite the viewer to consider the interconnectedness among urban development, the environment, social interaction and challenges, reconstruction and decay, as well as the metaphorical distance between memory and documentation of events and moments that occur within such environments.
Pam Frederick’s photo collages show the vibrancy of city scenes, storefronts, and social justice themes. The two photo collages, “I can’t fucking breathe” and “Did We Forget? So Soon?” are the same photos taken of a wall in Fells Point one year apart. The first photo denounces the police brutality against George Floyd, the Black Community, and other people of color. The second photo, shows the same wall with its powerful images and vital messages, all but erased.
Frederick’s process combines photos and a build-up of papered and painted layers, resulting in edge-to-edge compositions. Her technique shows the layered complexity of the subject matter being presented, which extends beyond a surface level conversation and composition.
In Urban | Remix, Veronica Szalus dramatically deconstructs a technology from the past, the cassette, to initiate a conversation that is still relevant today surrounding city life including environmental and social challenges. Szalus explores the interplay between cassette tapes to create wall-to-wall, and ceiling-to-floor constructs embracing the environmental factors of light, movement, and time. Her work contemplates the transition of these factors, including technology and innovation and its effect on environmental and social factors. Yet it also shows how matters of humanity and injustice as portrayed in Frederick’s work, can evolve at a different pace, and how that can influence the society surrounding us today.
The artists challenge each other to create an intentional setting, where their work encourages viewers to pay attention to what’s important through being an active participant in one’s environment and using communication as a powerful tool of expression. Frederick and Szalus’ work ricochets in a call and response to these issues, neighborhoods, moments, and people. The result is visually engaging, inspiring thought-provoking conversation, and allowing the viewer to consider the constant transformation and change that occur at the intersections of these social and environmental factors - here, in our own world.
Barry Gallery
2021
Marymount University, Arlington, Virginia
Barry Gallery
2020
Marymount University, Arlington, Virginia
Urban | Oxide
2019
Studio Gallery, Washington DC
Duo show with Veronica Szalus
Reviewed by Ashley Shah in East City Art
The urban environment is fluid, continually shifting, adjusting, decaying and renewing. We may notice it daily, either incrementally or in its entirety. This phenomenon is highlighted in Urban | Oxide, a collaboration of two artists, Pam Frederick and Veronica Szalus. Frederick's photographic collages capture and then re-mix street views of Paris, London, New York and Washington, DC. Szalus's work explores active rust and creates free-standing dimensional elements that consist of current building materials such as concrete and rebar. Throughout the exhibit, the artists invite the viewer to consider the interconnectedness among development, reconstruction, and decay, as well as the distance between memory and documentation.
Biomorphic Bop
2017
Studio Gallery, Washington DC
Steven Cushner, Curator
In this exhibition, Frederick pays homage to Biomorphic Abstraction. The layered, free-form and jazz-inspired biomorphic shapes are the subject for these still-life compositions.
Out of the Box
2015
American University, Katzen Arts Center/Rotunda Gallery, Washington, DC
Reviewed by Mark Jenkins in The Washington Post
Pam Frederick and Flora Kanter return to the Rotunda Gallery with their current exhibit. By deconstructing and reinterpreting the ordinary cardboard box, they have created a body of work that is not exactly painting and not exactly sculpture. For a year prior to the show, they salvaged loading docs to gather cardboard to create their site-specific sculptural installations. The result is a collaborative effort that pays homage to Louise Nevelson, Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg and combines the unique artistic expression and visions of Frederick and Kanter.
The Objects of Nature/The Nature of Objects
2014
American University, Katzen Arts Center/Rotunda Gallery, Washington, DC
This exhibition is a continuation of a shared series of paintings and mixed media work by Pam Frederick and Flora Kanter. It is the next installment of a narrative of work that explores the shared themes of the natural world and inanimate objects, uniquely created in the artists’ abstract language.
