#roycebannon

It's a shitty Saturday starting with snow and ending with sog: sleet melting slush to mush as I swishswosh down the streets of Brooklyn. Nothing out of the ordinary, I'm late, following my phone to 17 Frost Street forgetting the last art show I was at was held in the exact same space. Maybe too spaced.

The gallery is comfortably full of Royce's friends, a few hidden artists and those hip-ass BK art snobs smoking their cigarettes inside the garage-like gallery. The heat inside fogs up the windows and throwups are finger drawn into the mist as a welcome of sorts to any hesitant writer, artist, or whomever to stop in and check out Royce's work.

Dim shades of gray, black, and faded blues, desolate landscapes and illustrated ghost-like worlds. Royce's main character is that ghost-like image itself, a dull shade of blue, a blob, reminiscent of a tripped out, possibly passed Pacman universe. Royce's chief character is most often skateboarding his way through the dystopian terrain filled with liquor bottles, cigarette butts and books turned to sidewalk. The weather outside is almost a perfect match for the display.

Broken pieces of wood, a full wall of collaborations with Matt Siren, and after I've seen everything twice, I catch sight of a dude working his way through the crowd. We make eye contact and it seems obvious he's Royce. I introduce myself and I dive right into my main-stay: Who is your character – it's a ghost right?

Royce shies around the question, a fusion of himself, maybe a reflection of society or that all too familiar shade of the average Joe...except, Royce's "Ghost" is far from the Average Joe. His surroundings and that skating separate him apart. So I keep prying...

He used to skate, Royce tells me, before he fucked up his body. The ghost of Royce's skateboarding career, I think outloud, and we laugh and kind of trail off since that's some bleak shit.  So, bleak and burnt out – I head back out in the drizzle, imagining some round-headed street ghost maneuvering his way down the sidewalk with me.

Text by A Color Green 

Photos by @jen.genotype and @zeroproductivity