Thabo Mbeki the 69 year old former South African President travelled to the west African nation of Ivory Coast under the auspice of the African Union to attempt a reconciliation between the two presidential candidates both of whom claim to be the new president of the nation. Initially the Independent Electoral Commission announced Alassane Ouattara the victor with a 54% vote count, however the Constitutional Council later declared the incumbent Laurent Gbagbo the winner with 51% of the vote after invalidating the earlier results by eliminating votes from Ouattara’s northern region strongholds considered to be fraudulent.  The UN special envoy’s review of the results favored Ouattara, however the incumbent has defied international appeals to step aside.

Political Arts | Ian Bunn Visual Artist

My digital art work is essentially politics and art. It’s about iconic people, places and events of our day.  Recorded visually through daily compilations of manipulated digital images, posted online and disseminated via online media and social networks. The works are diaristic in nature that metaphorically record a spectator’s experience of the contemporary digital age.  The resulting work intentionally has a painterly aesthetic acknowledging my historical painting practice.

Adapting Pop Art’s notion of mass media imagery into a context of the contemporary digital age, the work draws on a myriad points of reference. Utilizing fractured images to provide an allusion to the digital noise pounding away daily into our sub consciousness.  The work is essentially popular culture arts, diverging from the traditional Pop Art notion of a pronounced repetition of a consumer icon, instead this work focuses on the deluge of contemporary digital content. The compilation of the fragmented imagery is vividly distractive, not unlike cable surfing or a jaunt through Times Square.

This digital photo manipulation art work is premised on the basis that Pop art in its beginnings, freeze-framed what consumers of popular culture experienced into iconic visual abstractions. With the advent of the techno age, visual information circulates in such quantities, so rapidly and exponentially, that to comprehend a fraction of it all becomes a kind of production process in itself.  Hence this work considers fragmented elements of Popular Culture through an artistic and conceptual exploration of specific people and events of the day.

www.ianbunn.com