Ghost Lives: Cursed Edition

I have shaken a hand on you, down bad, deep alone, loose as rope... Night by the wake rests our trust of holy bones and faint hope. A shaken land where love hearts kill the rain in me. Keep my soul safe here and I promise to do the same.

Alex Mazey’s playful text art sequence follows Ghost through a hyperreal metropolis beset with neoliberal temptation and eschatological peril. Woven between the visuals are virtuosic lyric poems: poignant, philosophical and irreverent. Mazey gamifies this astute, genre-defying collection with an intricate plexus of symbolism, mysticism, numerology, reference and ritual. Haunting and haunted, Ghost Lives paints an eerily recognisable picture of how it feels to be lonely, or, in other words, to be human.

“In Alex Mazey’s singular fusion of visual and Cute poetics, join Ghost as they pass through the liminal spaces of empty car parks, hotel corridors and lighthouses – searching for, but never quite finding, connection. Part poetry collection, part minimalist comic, in which our reality shifts from the political to the virtual, from FBI raids to survival horror-style locales – in which we are both the possessor and the possessed. Ghost reassures us that it’s heartbreaking to be human, and society is set up to fuel that loneliness. But, there is light within the gloom of capitalism’s ennui. Most notably the glow of vending machines at night – or is that the afterlife?” Matthew Haigh