Vice president for justice of the European Commission Viviane Reding, described France’s deportation of 8,300 Romanian’s and Bulgarian’s of Roma origin as a disgrace, threatening legal action from the executive arm of the European Union.  The Roma are commonly referred to as gypsies, often living in informal settlements made up of camps and caravans, usually in poverty and as a result have been targeted throughout history for persecution.  The deportations drew international criticism with the action be likened to the Jewish deportations of the second World War.  The previous year 2009 also resulted in the deportation of 10,000 Roma from France under similar circumstances, with French officials claiming the raids on the camps were as a result of a broader illegal immigration crackdown and not just directed at the Roma.

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