Pope Benedict XVI the 83-year-old head of the Roman Catholic Church concluded his visit to the predominantly Anglican Britain, only the second such visit by a catholic pope since 1534 when King Henry VIII renounced the Roman Catholic Church for its failure to annul his marriage.  The previous visit being nearly three decades earlier by John Paul II.  While visiting, the pope met with victims of clerical abuse, issuing an apology to those abused and expressing his sorrow for the “unspeakable crimes.”  He also held an open-air prayer meeting for an estimated 80,000 followers in Hyde Park while an estimated 10,000 demonstrators marched through London to Downing Street condemning the catholic church over its attitude to homosexuality, women’s rights, condom use and child abuse.

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