Fuck Now Suffer Later Review printed in the ODT By Franky Strachan 12/04/12

The polished floorboards of A Gallery are competing with the working matter of Dunedin-raised artist Philip James Frost. Rather than exhibiting paintings, Frost is displaying the guts of his studio, causing that age-old question regarding what makes art “art” to be vanquished by the cohesion of process and product. Books, drawings, magazines, paintings, a palette and the occasional lighter are in layers across the floor, but far from being the chaos known to make obsessive types twitch, this is (to the artist’s eye at least) an organised mess. Taking four hours for him to (re)create, the display is delicately individual; it provides curious insight to both the artist’s musings and his methodology. What may be perceived as an intriguing array of chewed-up-and-spat-out imagery is, in practice, an operative arrangement of ideas; a cocktail of resources so essential to Frost’s creativity that he arrived at the weekend to retrieve a few from the display. Significantly, it was curator Jay Hutchinson who saw the artistry of Frost’s working-matter, and it was through no self-aggrandisement that the artist (eventually) agreed to display it. Rather, and in an absorbing conceptual twist, this downward expulsion of the artist’s mind might well be taken as Hutchinson’s exhibition of Frost, or alternatively, an expose of the life-art continuum.