Dame Joan Sutherland the 83 year old Australian opera diva referred to as the greatest soprano of the 20th century has died. Sutherland was raised by her mother in Sydney after her tone-deaf Scots immigrant father died when she was six. After studying at the Royal College of Music in London her career commenced with Covent Garden and made her British debut in Mozart’s The Magic Flute in October 1952 as the First Lady. Richard Bonynge her husband coach collaborator and favorite conductor convinced her that her future lay in the flourishes and agile runs of the coloratura repertoire, she went onto describe his influence on her career as the “architect, builder and maintenance man”.
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.
