Jake Osmun

Minted by Jake Osmun in 2023.

Big Gulp (2023) is a new media artwork that begs inexhaustible questions with just as many answers. The piece lives in a dynamic state, moving through different phases and variations with time, proposing different veins and views of an enigma. An invitation to a comfortable seat and a tasty beverage, a command for attention to performance, a sentence to death. What are we to make of so many mixed messages? It hammers on irony, the idea of reclining in old sparky and downing a critically large cup of iced coffee, extra milk with four sugars. The hazy foam of digital distortion harkens to a ”more barbaric” time, and yet the savagery of the internet turns over more undiscovered stones of human quirks and secrets every day. Even crime and death has been commoditized, repackaged as true crime with orchestral scores in bodybag plastic to be ripped open and microwaved by you. There is no longer a moment of silence. The bastardization of tradition made anew in a nuanced middle finger, italicized with the internet punk’s glitched middle finger.

Jake Osmun is a 27 year old multidisciplinary artist based in New York, New York, who’s work covers a vast array of creative synergies and executions of the post internet punk. Osmun’s initial background starts at the center of a cultural zeitgeist in the Chicago underground music scene of the 2010’s, cutting his teeth under various pseudonyms as a photographer, director, and editor for several heavy hitters. Born in a transitory generation, Jake’s deepest influences are an amalgamation of the ever evolving meme culture and keynotes of nostalgia from the dawn of the internet age. The radical and experimental style evolutions from the Y2K era to now gave birth to a slew of surreal and absurd core memories which are the key components of Osmun’s work. Osmun creates and combines using a wide variety of mediums; drawing, painting, digital rendering, animation, and analog glitch tools to create his oeuvre, all to record this abstracted shared experience of all children of the internet. Pumping with fierce attitude, Osmun’s work dares to show the blunt truth of the culture of now, stylized by the absurd and over the top style beats of the last 30 years of the new millenia. Big bold type, graffiti bubbles, iron giants and beer bongs, monsters in hidden folders and dial up tones, iphones and anthropomorphic sponges, Osmun is the quintessential artist for the internet kid who dares to dream.