Dr Marcus Bunyan

Dr Marcus Bunyan is an artist who works with all forms of image making. His artistic practice investigates the boundaries between identity, space and environment, using fighter planes as a metaphor for humanist, environmental and technological themes. He trained as a classical black and white photographer but since 2004 has used mainly found and bought images to make his art.

Marcus writes Art Blart which reviews exhibitions in Melbourne, Australia and posts mainly photography based exhibitions from around the world, with insightful research and commentary. The website, which is a form of cultural memory with over 1,000 posts in its archive, has a readership of 4,000 people a day and 4,000 likes on Facebook. The site is being archived by Pandora from the National Library of Australia.

Marcus is currently writing a book on the Australian photographer Norman Deck. He finished a Master of Art Curatorship at The University of Melbourne in 2013 and has curated numerous exhibitions around Melbourne in the last few years. His doctoral thesis at RMIT University investigated the link between self-esteem and body image and traced the development of male body image within photographic practice and gym culture. The thesis has been adapted into a website that includes research on photographs held at The Kinsey Institute and The Minor White Archive.

Early artistic work investigated personal narratives: the shifting interfaces of identity, sexuality, space, time and environment.

Later artistic work explored personal narratives as more universal themes: the fracturing of identity, the binaries of light and dark, absence/presence, pattern/randomness in spatio-temporal environments.

Current artistic work proposes an understanding of the paradoxes of contemporary life: the fracturing of the image plane, the ethics and morals of humans, the choices human beings make in environments, the hidden threat, the faint cloudiness in the cornea of things seen, unclearly - using images of fighter planes.