Eugenie Blanchard aged 114 listed as the world’s oldest person has died. Blanchard was born in 1896 at the French West Indies territory of Saint-Barthelemy, an island 250 kilometres north of Guadeloupe. She pursued her faith as a Catholic nun in Curacao a Dutch West Indies colony, returning on her retirement to Saint-Barthelemy to live out a further 30 years. Blanchard was renown with the local population of Curacao for her offering of sweet treats to attract children along for religious classes, leading to her nickname ‘Douchy’ a reference to the word sweets in the local dialect. A family member of Blanchard is quoted as believing her long live resulted from a decision to give her virginity to God.

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