Dilma Rousseff the 63 year old former left leaning guerrilla leader who had been jailed and brutally tortured by the Brazilian military during the 1970s has won Brazil’s presidential election becoming the first woman to win such high office in one of the world’s highest growth economies. Rousseff an economist and former energy minister promised to follow the policies of her predecessor and mentor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva that has successfully lifted twenty million people out of poverty in the Latin American country. Working as the extremely popular former president Lula da Silva’s chief of staff, Rousseff over time became more pragmatic to ultimately receive his decisive support during the election.
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
