Small Things Come In Large Packages

Works in Jan’s Totems series present icons, objects, and scenes as metaphors for reflection on current events and themes relevant to contemporary living, and

Small Things Come In Big Packages is a tongue-in-cheek joke and statement about the man who currently holds the office of the Presidency of the United States, with help from a famous painting from American art history.

That painting is a 1962 work by Californian painter Ed Ruscha called OOF, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ruscha’s piece describes the sound one makes when one gets punched in the stomach (“— OOF!”).

This print uses the uses the same colors, sans-seraphed font, and square aspect-ratio format as Ruscha’s paintings, but substitutes the phonetic spelling of a word the current President uses to approximate the English word 'huge.'

In contrast with Rusch’a work, where the ‘OOF’ fills almost the entire canvas, the relatively-small size of Jan’s ‘yuge’ is intended to demonstrate Jan's estimation of the size of the man who uses it, as well as the same feeling as Ruscha’s work, since, as Jan says: “every time I hear that person speak, I feel like I’m being punched in the stomach: OOF.“