ben frost

(excerpt 2 from interview with DESKTOP magazine)
To date, what is the most controversial piece of artwork you have created? Did you expect this response?

The most controversial piece would have to be the collaboration I did with Roderick Bunter ‘Where Do You Want To Go Today?’’ which exhibited at the Brisbane IMA & the Sydney MCA as part of the Primavera exhibition in 2002. It’s a huge 12m x 2.4m piece that features girls masturbating over a pastiche of subverted washing powder advertisements, and a central scene of the Pokemon Pikachu participating in a sex orgy with it’s human characters.
On it’s first exhibition someone came into the IMA and slashed a few paintings with a knife in reaction to the content of the show. The police tried to have the exhibition shut down in response to public complaints and the same thing happened in the final weeks when it was displayed at the MCA. Funnily enough it’s now on permanent display in the collection of channel 7 boss Kerry Stokes in Perth, which is kind of ironic because of the concepts we were trying to express in relation to the media.
We knew the work would be confronting, but didn’t really expect the police to be involved. I don’t think it takes much to create hysteria in controlled environments these days. .

Can you explain the how the ideas for your artwork come together? You explore a lot of different themes so how do you tie them all in?

I spend a lot of time initially sourcing imagery from a variety of places, which I find to be the most satisfying part of the process. It’s kind of like the feeling you get op-shopping or digging through half-price bargain bins. Like if you find a chair that nobody wants anymore, and you can imagine all it needing is a new cover and some paint on the legs. In the same way, when I see say Snow White kissing a sparrow, my mind is ticking over as to whether a hand grenade or severed head in place of the sparrow would give the image new life.
I think thematically, I consciously look for ways of subverting images in a topical context – whether it’s how I’m feeling at a particular time or what’s happening in our local or global environment. Subconsciously however I think artists spend their entire career trying to express perfectly a single idea, but that idea manifests itself in so many different ways. I often revisit the same dynamic, but exchange icons or images or even explore it within different mediums.