William Kipchirchir Samoei arap Ruto the 44 year old Kenyan Higher Education Minister has been suspended from office after three constitutional court judges dismissed his plea not to stand trial over corruption allegations of defrauding a state corporation over the sale of forest land.  Ruto a potential 2012 presidential election candidate from the Rift Valley of Kenya sort the order claiming he would not get a fair trial, denying any wrongdoing and the charges were politically motivated. The country’s new constitution states that anyone facing criminal charges should step aside from public office. The constitution was designed to avoid the mayhem of the 2007 general election that resulted in approximately 1300 deaths with thousands dislocated.

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