"COLOSSUS: Ben Frost and Roderick Bunter"
2000-05-04 until 2000-06-10
Institute of Modern Art
Brisbane, QL, AU Australia

Contemporary visual artists work in an environment in which advertising is constantly presented as the most lucrative, effective and desirable use of their talents. In a world in which everything is reduced to infotainment and corporate masturbation, artists find it easier to make money in advertising than in private art production.

Enter Roderick Bunter and Ben Frost. Their work comes on like some gonzo 60s garage record - right in your face - brash and beautiful. Their mission is meaning, their quarrel with the mundane. Their expertly executed paintings are an elbow in the ribs of benumbing pop culture: ferociously cool images that force themselves on you with the self-assurance of a rock 'n' roll star. Never afraid to engage with commercial imagery, each artist enlists salvoes of appropriated images from contemporary ad-mass culture in order to critique it.

Rod Bunter's arresting, pared-back, solidly coloured canvases issue from our world, but are somehow beautifully detached from it. Employing both found objects and recognisable commercial logos - either reproduced with clinical precision, or manipulated to humorous ends - his visually arresting work provides a site for both critical contemplation, as well as detached reverie.

Everything is wonderful in Ben Frost's paintings. One depicts a pair of Dead-eyed pre-pubescents shooting smack in the sunshine, while overhead, instruction-manual-stylised aeroplanes fall from an eggshell-blue sky. At one level, Frost is clearly taking the piss and to good effect. On another however, he is mounting an attack on the constant vilification of young people in the media as drug-addicted gen-Xers lost to Satan's dark legions. - TEXT MARK GOMES

Colussus will feature a 'mini-retrospective' of favs from the vaults alongside a 12 metre billboard collaborative work.

WARNING - This exhibition has been given an R rating and contains imagery associated with sex, drugs and adult issues

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