Tom DeLay the 63 year old former Republican House majority leader renowned for his tight control of the Congressional caucus nicknamed “The Hammer” has been found guilty by a jury of money laundering charges. DeLay was convicted of conspiring to channel corporate campaign donations to Texas candidates where it is illegal to use corporate sponsorship for political campaigns. Delay showing no remorse for his actions faces potentially life imprisonment when he again appears for sentencing, claiming that criminalisation of politics undermines the system expression his disappointed in the outcome. District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg held an alternative view, expressing that public officials elected to represent the people must do so honestly and they will be held accountable if they do not.
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.
