On the 65th anniversary of what Americans call V-J Day, which marks the victory and ending of the war in 1945 over Japan, Americans and 6000 buglers gather for a group “kiss-in” in Times Square and across the country.  The Buglers played the military funeral tune “Taps”, in this first national day of remembrance for the World War II generation that survived the Great Depression to win major conflicts in the Pacific and Europe against tyrannical adversaries. Celebrations in future years will be commemorated on the second Sunday of August.  The celebration is inspired by the Alfred Eisenstaedt photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square.  The nurse Edith Shain passed away in June aged 91 before her campaign for the celebration came to fruition.

Popular Culture 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.