Penelope Benson a 23 year old sized14 model from Australia who lives at Kirribilli on the north shore of Sydney, took part in the Milan Fashion Week to become the first Australian plus-size model to do so. Benson was engaged by prestigious designer Elena Miro whose real name is Elena Miroglio, to grace the catwalk in her fashion show at the festival. Miro’s spring/summer 2011 collection was unveiled at an independent show to the Milan Fashion Week’s official program after being excluded. Miro a plus-size fashion designer had been the official opener for the previous five years of the official program. Australian lacks plus-size models due to the limited opportunities available with local magazines, and Benson’s international appearance is a first for the industry.

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