Samuel Perez, Filo Filo, and Edward Nasau aged 14-15 years found alive after 50 days adrift in an aluminum dinghy in the South Pacific.  The three Tokelauans boys had set off in their small vessel with only a couple of coconuts on board and no water.  The vessel drifted 1400 kilometers across the Pacific until located by tuna boat.  The boys had survived on little rain water and a seagull they had managed to catch, but without further rainwater had resorted to drinking seawater and only days away from tragedy.  The three had lost weight but otherwise were in physically good health. Family and villagers had held a memorial service for the boys thought lost forever to the sea following an extensive aerial search.

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