Mike Edwards a former cellist and founding member of the 1970s group rock Electric Light Orchestra died while travelling alone in his van near Kingsbridge, South Devon UK. Edwards joined ELO in 1972 with the band reaching stardom with a cover of Roll Over Beethoven.  He was renowned for his eccentric style of playing the Cello and for the bizarre costumes he wore.  Edwards left the band in 1975 to pursue his Buddhist faith, changing his name to Deva Pramada. He was killed when a 600kg cylindrical bale of hay rolled down a hill gathering sufficient momentum to hurtle through a 5 metre hedge bouncing into his path and landing onto his van, killing him instantly.

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