Faisal Shahzad, a 31year old Pakistani-born US citizen was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for the attempted car bombing at New York city’s Times Square by US District Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum.  Shadzad had received training from the Pakistani Taliban known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.  The organization had provided funding for the bombing attempt. Smiling while the sentence was pronounced he defiantly claimed other attacks on America are imminent. He went onto denounce the US and NATO forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, stating to the court “Brace yourselves because the war with Muslims has just begun, we Muslims don’t abide by human-made laws because they are always corrupt.”

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