Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

No longer do you rely on the moment (November 4th)

Tacita Dean the 46 year old UK Berlin based YBA visual artist who works primarily with film has unveiled her latest work in the darkened Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern as the 12^th commission of the Unilever series. The work is a looped film installation, entitled Film, and is a homage to the declining analogue film industry under threat from the burgeoning digital and animation technologies. Dean is renowned for her work in analogue film, although she still explores a variety of other alternative media including photography and sound. The catalogue for this exhibition references international directors including as Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese who provide favorable reflections on the power of analogue film. Dean laments the decline of the industry with the pending closure of her favorite London Soho Film Laboratory, announcing it will cease printing her chosen media the 16mm film.

Inspired by Charlotte Higgins http://ow.ly/75ZyR image source Teresa Gleadowe http://ow.ly/75Zwo

A moral intensity, an intelligence and a maturity (November 3rd)

Martin Scorsese the 68 year old American film director and producer of Italian origin from New York presented the restored version of Federico Fellini’s back-and-white classic “La Dolce Vita” at the Rome Film Festival. Scorsese an admirer of Italian cinema films helped restore the film through his Film Foundation, an organization established to preserve aged and deteriorating films for future generations.  Scorsese claims to have been heavily influenced as a youth by this particular film released in the early 1960s depicting Rome’s celebrity nightlife of the previous decade as a satirical spectacle of life, society and culture. The three hour epic length film broke open cinematic narratives through its abandonment of any story or plot.

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