Britain’s former prime minister Tony Blair was greeted by over 200 noisy protesters, chanting protest slogans “Blair lied, millions died” and “Lock him up for genocide”, throwing objects in his direction including plastic bottles shoes and eggs, although none land near him.  Police made arrests as the protestors surged towards him trying push down a security barrier. Blair was attending the Irish capital Dublin for a public signing session promoting his memoirs.  In his memoir he says he can’t regret the decision he made to declare war on Iraq in 2003, but had not foreseen “nightmare” that was unleashed afterwards. He received a reported book advance of 4.6 million pounds with all the proceeds going to a veterans war charity the Royal British Legion.

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