| The nightmares first started when I was about eight. 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 as humor is an important part of my work, I really did have a supernatural childhood. |  |
Nightmares of Self-Destruct – Ben Frost
The nightmares first started when I was about eight. 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 as 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, in growing up in various backwater areas of south east Queensland and within 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, I have no ability to do anything about it.
In my earliest recollections, my 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% made of wires and tubing. Huge, colossal tunnels and conduits spark, clank and criss-cross 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 somehow to locate and fix the problem amidst the chaos of a thousand billion tons of cables and wiring, the intensity of such an impossible task causes my 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.
The nightmare isn’t as frequent as it was during my odd childhood and even odder teenage years, but I believe that this is because, in a lot of ways, I have had the ability to express those unconscious notions in my paintings.
There is a certain horror in my work, a kind of cinematic narrative where the good guy always loses. There is 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 on 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 20th century.
At first my art and my nightmares are based on a feeling of wanting to express this consumerist, pop-culture Armageddon that we are all a part of, but I realize I have no choice as, like all of us, I have been given the responsibility of its maintenance without having ever flipped through the instruction book (if there ever was one).
Any second now, any second now—we’ll all wake up.
