"There's something strange in [my] neighborhood..." A few weeks ago I was mailing a package at the Kenmore Square Post Office and spotted this wide-eyed graffiti ghost. Now, I'm not advocating for the illegal defacement of private or public property, but I must admit that this painted paranormal encounter was the highlight of my workday!
This ghost along Storrow Drive is purple. I wonder what other colors are out there?
Fast-forward to Memorial Day weekend, when I saw two more little ghouls in the greater Kenmore area during my drive out of the city. I began to wonder, how many more versions I would find if I left the library more? Since I'm up against a dissertation deadline, I turned to Google instead, but surprisingly, my search came up dry. Am I the only person playing this real-life game of Pac-Man on the streets of Boston?
Space Invader's Pac-Man mosaics BBO 24–27 (from left) in Bilbao near the Guggenheim Museum.
Space Invader is another, more high-profile street artist who has similarly appropriated Pac-Man's video-game-villians. He was featured in Banksy's "documentary" Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010). You can learn more about his art on his official website, which explains how he has inspired a global corps of artists to "invade" different cities using his signature style. However, it would not appear that our artist is seeking membership to this posse, as the invaders are known for their use of tile mosaic to approximate the pixelated graphics of video games from the 1970s and 1980s. Still, our local artist also creates a subtly pixelated effect by using Boston's famous brownstone as a ground. The bricks generate a gridded texture and lend the images a kind of site-specificity. The Boston ghosts also have a revamped silhouette with clean, quirky clean curves; I love the economy of using a single serpentine black line to delineate both eyes at once. It's probably an added bonus that this trick must speed up the painting process, enabling the artist to better evade authorities.
Another tangerine tag haunts the center of the Memorial Drive rotary by the Boston University bridge.
So, "Who ya gonna call?" Because the Ghostbusters have already packed up and left town (they were filming the all-female reboot here last fall) I'm asking you: If you see something, say something! Add a comment (or better yet, a photo) if you spot another example from this street artist's oeuvre.
Happy Hunting!
Sarah