The revolving door for the top job in Tokyo remained with current Japanese Prime Minister, the 63 year old Naoto Kan.  Kan unlike his predecessors, managed to retain his job as the Prime Minister and head of the ruling DJP (Democratic Party of Japan) after convincingly defeating his challenger Ichiro Ozawa, the somewhat tainted powerbroker of the party, having been challenged after only three months into the job. Japan has suffered from a lack of consistent policy as a result of the leadership changes, exacerbated particularly at a time when this third largest economy of the world has a strengthening currency while in the context of a deflating economy attempting to support significant issues such as escalating aged population and national public debt that is twice the economy’s size.  Kan has vowed to reduce public spending and borrowing.

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