Yung Jake’s Art on Downtown LA Billboard

Yung Jake’s emoji artwork. | Image: WeTransfer

For the entire month of January, the Ace Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles features artwork by Yung Jake, aka Jake Patterson (Art BFA 12), a Los Angeles-based internet artist and “the art world’s favorite rapper,” according to Huffington Post.

The project is part of Dear DTLA, a collaboration between content-sharing company WeTransfer and the hotel. For the past several months, a different artist treats the billboard next to the hotel’s historic Spanish Gothic building as their own personal canvas. “It’s an opportunity to broadcast something out of the ordinary, connective, weird, heady or idealistic,” says Ace Hotel partner Kelly Sawdon in a Los Angeles Times article.

Artists featured have included London-based artist Robert Montgomery, Los Angeles-based artist Cali Thornhill DeWitt and for Dear DTLA‘s inaugural billboard in July last year, graphic designer and CalArts alumnus Brian Roettinger (Art BFA 04).

Jake is known for portraits of celebrities using emojis and interactive music videos. His work constantly illuminates and challenges the way we communicate through technology.

From the press release:

For the billboard, Yung Jake has composed an original image of distorted water bottles, inspired by motifs from his Twisted Metal series. In this series, he experiments with contemporary pastiche, emulating the physical warping of a real object through digital means. He constructs a message about overt deception by combining these bottles with a digital vector – a single emoji icon on a bright green screen.

In addition to the billboard art, Jake offers digital artwork and music downloadable through WeTransfer at deardtla.com.