Here is the latest interview with Ben Frost, who recently showed at the Shooting Gallery in his exhibition See Inside Box For Details. Ben Frost reflects on the inherently pornographic nature of advertisement, the repercussions of faking one’s own death, and the twisted sexualization of manga girls.

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Your work can be viewed as a critique of the norms of Western culture and the bombardment of advertising that comes with it all. Was this a focus when you first started painted or is it something that began developing without intent?

My artwork is like a jilted lover taking revenge after a long term relationship goes bad. I loved and trusted in television, McDonald’s, and KFC – until I found out they had been cheating on me. They were doing unspeakable things behind my back – things most people would find offensive (even illegal) if they ever found out. Now I’m filled with anger and jealousy and I can never trust the happy slogans and jingles that tempt me to get back together once again.

I imagine you’re probably more aware of product design in your daily life than most people. When you’re in grocery stores or pass by shopping malls is your mind always seeing new double entendre?

Supermarkets are almost pornographic when I wander through them now. The images of milky explosions on cereal packages are orgasmic, the rows of cream filled tarts and honey-buns force me to blush and leave quietly. Often when I’m painting something onto a package, there will be little brand slogans that I hadn’t seen at first, that will bring the whole double entendre together, like ‘Just Add Beef’ or ‘Crammed With Joy’. It‘s also fun then when it comes time to give the painting a title, for example there’s a work in this show of a half naked manga girl with large breasts painted onto a Tomato Soup package called ‘Tomato Soup Cans’, or the painting of Bugs Bunny on the Special K package, called ‘Lost Down the Rabbit Hole’ (which relates not only to Alice in Wonderland but also using the drug Ketamine and being in a ‘K hole’). It’s these little observations and being able to change their intended meanings into new and twisted meanings that I find interesting.

Common elements throughout “See Inside Box for Details” are images of young children or cartoon characters associated with childhood, placed in compositions that strip these figures of any innocence. Do you think that the proliferation of sex and violence in the media, and the increasing ease of access to it through the internet, has made childhood innocence a thing of the past?

Yes, this has been a common thread in my work, and it is interesting to see how desensitized people are now to the sight of nudity, sexuality and violence. It’s almost as if the graphic images that I put into the packaging artwork are supposed to be there – like McDonald’s has just released a new campaign for ‘Naughty Fries’ or ‘Porn Burgers’. This then re-enforces how unquestioning we are to the marketing of advertisers and corporations – we just buy and consume whatever it is they are promoting this month. My juxtapositions have always aimed to show the facade that we are presented with – how the shiny and colourful exterior rarely reflects the actual product or how that product came to be made. From the a child’s first ‘Happy Meal’ the immersion and participation in western culture begins, and from then on there there consists a life time of excuses and pretending thats we are not a part of the corporate western death machine that sits behind the facade pulling our strings. The first step of recovery is acceptance and acknowledgement of responsibility, which seems to be one of the hardest thing for western society to do actually do.

I know that in 2024, you faked your own death for an exhibit. I’ve always been curious about what that involved, can you tell us a bit about it?

I was moving to Melbourne and decided my last exhibition farewell should be a metaphoric ‘death’. Invitations to the exhibition ‘Ben Frost Is Dead’ were printed in the form of newspaper funeral notices, inviting friends and relatives to a ‘service’ at the gallery. A lot of people thought I had actually died and the media ran stories on it, and it became a prank that I’m still talking about in interviews.

There are quite a few works in this recent body of work that include girls drawn in the style of Japanese anime. What draws you to this style?

The characters are cute and innocent looking, and there is so much of it available to draw from to source images and as inspiration. Having painted a lot of manga and hentai images, I’ve noticed the way they are composed is somewhat startling. The female characters’ faces seem to be of young girls, but the bodies are those of fully formed women – and are always switching between engaging in graphic sex acts and cute doe-eyed posturing. There’s something very wrong about it, but it’s designed with a facade of cuteness that is undeniable. I think this is also a metaphor for advertising and how its depiction has its own disturbing and appealing incongruities.