Sarah Palin the Republican former vice-presidential candidate invoked the name of Martin Luther King at a rally in the same location where 47 years ago he had delivered a speech at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC.   Top billing at the rally held in Washington was cable TV talk show host Glenn Beck where tens of thousands of Americans had rallied to attest what they believed to be American traditional values and as a salute to veterans.  The rally attended by many Tea Party movement conservatives, was focused on a call for Americans to embrace religion, ‘Turning back to God’.  The rally was criticized by civil rights leaders for the inappropriateness of the choice of date, with a counter protest held by Al Sharpton stating “They want to disgrace this day and we’re not giving them this day. This is our day and we ain’t giving it away”.

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