Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Roland Emmerich the 55 year old German film director renowned for his highly visual effect disaster and action films has controversially questioned Shakespeare’s authorship of his plays and sonnets in a soon to be released movie titled ‘Anonymous’. Emmerich depicts the nobleman 17^th Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere as the true author of the plays, and Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon as merely an “inarticulate buffoon”. The argument being that the Earl of Oxford needed to remain anonymous due to the highly political nature of the plays in the context of the succession struggles during the late reign of Queen Elizabeth. Emmerich is often criticized for over relying of visual effects to counter flimsy narratives and factual inaccuracies, to which Emmerich counters that he is a filmmaker providing enjoyable fictional entertainment.

Inspired by Tim Masters http://ow.ly/5DggI image source Franz Richter http://ow.ly/5Dgyn

You're going to run this thing while I'm talking (November 15th)

Kanye West the 33 year old Hiphop artist, who created angst five years ago after Hurricane Katrina, by accusing President Bush of not caring about black people in response to the slow government action to the disaster, cancelled his scheduled performance at the Today Show in protest to NBC over a recent interview.  West while being interviewed by Matt Lauer was asked questions in response to Bush’s emotional comments to the Katrina accusation, prompting West to protest at the manner in which the interview was being conducted, specifically the playing in the background of the Bush interview recently conducted following the release of his memoir.

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