France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy’s planned pension reforms have created much angst with thousands of workers staging a one-day strike across France protesting a plan to increase the retirement age from 60 to 62.  Striking workers from both the public and private sectors protested at over 200 separate demonstrations throughout the nation, including workers from medical, media, finance, education and justice sectors. Sarkozy’s ratings at the polls have taken a dramatic slide with now only a 30 percent approval rating, deemed extremely low for a president.  The poll results indicate a defining moment in his presidency and quest for fundamental pension reform as he heads towards re-election in 2012.  Pension reform is claimed to be necessary due to the financial burden on the system from increasing life expectancy.

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