Mary MacKillop a strong-willed and determined leader who co-founded the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart in 1867 and died in 1909 has been canonized to become Australia’s first Catholic saint. Claimed as a feminist before her time, she issued instructions to the nuns of her order that when women got the vote in Australia “It is the duty on us all to vote . Get advice from some leading man in whom you have confidence or from the priest, but keep your voting secret.” MacKillop and her order in 1871 were excommunicated after revealing a pedophile priest was engaged in “scandalous behavior” which was subsequently revoked five months later at the Bishop’s deathbed.

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