Ben Frost Interview | Art
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. We try to understand where Ben Frost is coming from after the jump.
Ben Frost is Dead? Tell us about Ben Frost and why is he not alive?
The name goes back to a prank I did when I was first starting out, where I faked my own death. I now find that being dead is awesome for tax purposes but terrible when birthdays come round.
Growing up and as all of us are being subjected to pop culture, what icons do you think influenced you the most when you were younger?
I used to spend a lot of time drawing the characters from TV cartoons when I was a kid. Roger Ramjet especially. I guess nothing has changed. I never really understood Disney – I think my parents took me to see Fantasia, but I never understood what it was all about. All those characters still baffle me – especially Goofy and Pluto – I mean they’re both dogs but Mickey keeps one as a pet and the other is his best friend. There’s a twisted metaphor in there somewhere that I don’t even want to think about.
Juxtaposed to innocence lies something more sinister, a subject found in much of your work, when do you think you started thinking this way? Or has this critique been with you for as long as you can remember?
I think everybody is pretty horrified the first Christmas they work out Santa is actually their Dad. I always felt pretty annoyed reading advertisements in comics when I was a kid – because all the comics were from America, and you could never send away for ‘Sea Monkeys’ or ‘X-Ray Specs’ and those kind of things. From then on I’ve always hated advertising. It promises so much but never delivers – definitely a love/hate affair.
How do you go about putting together a piece. In what environment do you like to paint? Do you play music, do you prefer silence?Are there things that happen which trigger or inspire your creativity?
I generally spend a lot of time collecting images and making mental notes when I see them how I can change them into something twisted. I use an overhead projector in my work and so I have literally hundreds and hundreds of transparencies covered in images that I use to work out my paintings. I run an art studio called ‘Worlds End’ in Surry Hills, Sydney and I have a space with 12 other artists, so there’s always people coming and going and I like this kind of environment to work in. If anyone reading this is passing through Sydney, make sure you stop by.
Your work has a collage style to it, when did you start producing pieces like this? Why do you favour this approach?
I started making a lot of zines when I was in university, and at the time I embraced ways of making art that didn’t require ‘drawing skill’ or traditional ways of making images. My viewpoint has always been that we have reached a point of image saturation whereby the juxtapositioning of ready-made images is a valid way of making something original.
There are many layers and elements in your style, are these preconceived or brought in as you develop a piece?
I try to subvert things as I’m going along, but often I’ll find an image will require being redrawn to get things like perspective accurate. My thoughts generally work along the lines of how things can be manipulated to change the meaning to a polar opposite. This can be a subtle manipulation or something really in your face – it often depends on where the artwork is going to be shown that will drive its context.
How has 2009 been for you? What do you have planned for the rest of the year?
At the moment I’m working on my next solo show in New York at Brooklynite Gallery opening June 20th. It’s called ‘Plague
Landscapes’ and i’m painting as quickly as my brushes will allow.
Drawing from globally recognisable pop icons your work is evidently understood across cultures with exhibitions outside of Australia. Tell us about your most memorable journey?
I did a show in Beijing in 2007 which was pretty amazing. They wouldn’t let me paint anything political or provocative, but it was interesting to get more of a feel how art outside of the Western mainstream is being made.
Today you have the opportunity to change one thing in the world, what would you change?
I would start World War III early.
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