bio:

Sydney artist Ben Frost is most well known for his confronting and often controversial Pop Art paintings. Using a ‘collage’ style of unlikely juxtapositions, his dynamic paintings are complex mash-ups of popular culture that savagely critique our media and advertising obsessed society.

His painting 'White Children Playing; Late 1900's' was deemed too controversial for some for its graphic depiction of children shooting-up drugs, and was debated recently on the channel 7 Sunrise program. His now infamous 2000 exhibition and art prank ‘Ben Frost is Dead’ saw him fake his own death and was branded ‘tasteless’ when the art world and national media actually believed his demise. Police have threatened to close every exhibition his 12m long collaborative painting ‘Where Do You Want to Go Today?’ has been exhibited and a disgruntled viewer went so far as to slash one of the paintings with a knife in reaction to the confronting imagery.

Ben was an invited artist at the 2002 'Primavera' exhibition at the Sydney MCA , and more recently at galleries such as: 798 Space in Beijing,The Arm in New York, White Walls in San Francisco, Cosh Gallery in London and Studio Apart in Amsterdam.

Ben’s work has appeared in countless magazines and newspapers including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Australian Art Collector, Empty, Monster Children, and the Sydney Morning Herald and was a contributing illustrator for over 3 years to Black + White Magazine.

Ben will be speaking about his work at the 2008 Semi Permanent Conference in Sydney and Brisbane, as well as the AGIdeas Conference in Melbourne.

Artist Statement from NYARTS magazine 2007

The nightmares first started when I was about 8. It didn’t help that the house I lived in at the time was haunted, and that by this time I had already experienced several apparitions and poltergeist events –
from flying cutlery to my mother’s spinning wheel turning violently while home alone watching Laverne & Shirley.

It’s true that everybody loves a good ghost story, and as much that humor is an important part of my work – I really did have a supernatural childhood.
This extended to repeated UFO phenomena throughout puberty – long before drugs and alcohol had anything to do with it. Sometimes I even questioned whether there was some sort of repressed sexual abuse, but growing up in various backwater areas of south east Queensland in a very supportive and wholesome family there was nothing other than the occasional experimentation with the boy next door or my best friend’s sister at Boy Scout camp.

But I digress – it is these recurring nightmares that have had the most bearing on my continued art practice. For most of my adult life I have suffered from ‘the Old Hag’, a troublesome event where one awakes in the middle of the night unable to move or call out whilst a feeling of evil and dread fills the room. My nightmares have a similar feeling of impending doom and more importantly the inability to do anything about it.

In my earliest recollections, the nightmare begins with a view of the entire planet – its weight and immensity the focus. Soon I am inside the planet, but instead of soil, dirt and molten rock, it is 100 percent made of wires and tubing. Huge colossal tunnels and conduits sparking and clanking and criss-crossing the interior of the world as if it were some massive engine that kept everything on the exterior running smoothly. At this point it becomes evident that I am responsible for this machine, and that I know nothing of its maintenance - let alone ever having flipped through the instruction book (if there ever was one). My fear level begins to rise as I realize something has gone wrong. Deep inside the machine there is a malfunction and the entire earth reels and shakes as it begins to self-destruct. With only minutes to somehow locate and fix the problem amidst the chaos of one thousand billion tons of cables and wiring, the intensity of such an impossible task causes my own mind to self-destruct from sheer frustration and desperation.

I wake up at this point in a pool of sweat, shaking and sometimes crying, with the intensity of the nightmare scenario to stay with me for days at a time until the next time it happens again.
The nightmare isn’t as frequent as it was during my odd childhood, and even odder teenage years, but I believe that it’s because in a lot of ways I have had the ability to express those unconscious notions in my paintings.

There is horror in my work, a kind of cinematic narrative where the good guy always loses. There is a duplicity where cuteness and evil coexist behind the saccharine façade of a comic-book character or a much loved fast food restaurant. I am reflecting a world in trouble, a heaving dying fur-seal of an earth that is being repeatedly clubbed with baton-sized television remote controls. The drips that melt down the canvas are nods to an immense self-destructing machine made up of endless icons, logos and expressions that are the infected medical waste of the 20 th century.

At first it is a feeling of wanting to express this consumerist, pop-culture Armageddon that we are a part of, but I realize I have no choice, as, like you I have been given the responsibility of its maintenance and I never flipped through the instruction book (if there ever was one).

Any second now, any second now – we’ll all wake up.