Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Jorge Hank Rhon the 55 year old Mexican politician, gaming business owner, father of 19 and former president (Mayor) of the Municipality of Tijuana was released from custody after his arrest 10 days earlier when nearly 100 Mexican soldiers raided his property seizing a substantial arsenal of weapons. Two of the weapons have been linked to drug related murders. Rhon claimed the weapons had been planted during the raid, however the legality of the raid itself was brought into question having been conducted without warrant, resulting in the court determining that all evidence was inadmissible. However upon Rhon’s release he was immediately rearrested by the state prosecutor’s office for questioning over the murders relating to the two guns, then released again after they failing to obtain a Court order to hold him.

Inspired by Sandra Dibble ow.ly/5lDUs image source Fulaofiles ow.ly/5lDOP

World's most prolific arms trafficker (November 18th)

Viktor Bout the 43 year old former officer of the Soviet Air Force dubbed the ‘Merchant of Death’ has been extradited from Thailand to the USA to face charges of arms dealing and terrorism that carry potential 25 years to life imprisonment sentences. Evidence against Bout was gathered during a sting operation during which an arsenal of weapons including surface to air missiles, armor piercing rocket launchers, AK47s, ammunition and landmines where offered for sale to agents purporting to be Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces a designated foreign terrorist organization and the world’s largest supplier of cocaine. Bout built his arms business in the early part of the 1990s as the former Soviet Union disintegrated.

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