Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Wealth gap between Colombian rich and poor (November 23rd)

Guillermo León Sáenz Vargas known as Alfonso Cano the 63 year old commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) a Marxist rebel group has been killed in action by the Colombian Army in an air raid. Vargas was shot and killed in during a government led offensive in Cauca named ‘Operation Odyssey’. The Colombian president Juan Santos confirmed the death on national television, following the pursuit of Vargas when he fled his stronghold in Tolima months earlier. Cano believed the rebellion was a class struggle which initially set out to reduce the wealth gap between rich and poor in Colombia, and did not hesitate to kidnap politicians and the wealthy as hostages to fund the war effort or to exchange for hundreds of his jailed colleagues. Vargas assumed the leadership of FARC in 2008 after the founder and leader Manual Vélez died of a heart attack.

Inspired by Simon Romero http://ow.ly/7rMgd image source victimasdelterrorismo http://ow.ly/7rMmp

We are not going to let down our guard (September 29th)

Commander Mono Jojoy also known as Jorge Briceno of the Colombian FARC rebel insurgency the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia has been killed in a Colombian Government air strike. The US backed crackdown that resulted in the rebel chief’s death occurred in the FARC’s last stronghold in the Macarena region.  His death is believed to have delivered a significant blow to the already weakened guerrilla insurgency after having suffered the loss of other top commanders in recent years including the founder Maneul Marulanda.  Colombia’s fortunes appear to have turned as the guerrillas have been forced into remote areas of mountainous jungles following a long history since the 1960s of kidnappings and cocaine trafficking.

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