French journalist and television presenter Melissa Theuiau has joined the illustrious ranks of Oprah Winfrey in having her identity stolen by online scam sites for use in bogus advertising.  Presented under the names of Karen and Amy her image is used along side advertisements promoting berry diets, slimming teas and colon cleansing solutions.  The images used without permission imply an endorsement of the products. Products which often make inflated and deceptive claims about their value, and when customers agree to free trials they are unwittingly agreeing to charges for other items on a month to month contract, or agreeing to excessive postage and handling costs.  Around $US30 million has been scammed from consumers last year alone by these sites according to the US Federal Trade Commission.

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