Richard Holbrooke the 69 year old US Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan and former ambassador to the United Nations has died after extensive surgery following a torn aorta. Holbrooke spent the majority of his life in public service and credited for the Dayton Peace Accords which ended the war in Bosnia that had caused the deaths of 200,000 people. During the dark diplomatic period of the Bush years, Holbrooke turned his skill to providing leadership to the Global Business Coalition on Tuberculosis, Malaria and HIV/AIDS. Returning to the diplomatic world stage with the demise of the Neocons Holbrooke dynamically applied his skill to his greatest challenge, an attempt to bring peace to the mess created by the Neocons in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Inspired by Jake Tapper at ABC News http://ow.ly/3rpjz and Michael Elliott at Time http://ow.ly/3rpjp

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