Critical Review
Invasion Guide 02, Los Angeles / Mission Hollywood is a mixed media artwork produced by the renowned French street artist Invader in 2005. The artwork, which comes in an edition size of 50, is a book with a micro-mosaic tile cover and kept in a plexiglas box. The cover features a small alien rendered using black tiles with white square eyes which sits menacingly at the bottom right of the cover. The books title is also written using black tiles and set against a red and white striped backdrop.
The alien on the book’s cover is a character from the popular Japanese arcade game, Space Invaders. This game inspired Invader’s impressive installation project, the Space Invader project, which the artist started in 1998 and involved him travelling all over the world, carrying out ‘invasion waves’ in which he would install mosaics of aliens onto the walls of the cities he visited.
Invasion Guide 02, Los Angeles / Mission Hollywood is part of the Space Invaders project as it provides detailed information regarding the mosaics Invader installed in Los Angeles between 1999 and 2004. The book enables people to follow in the footsteps of Invader and track down his alien installations. Invader hopes his project will engage people who aren’t typically interested in art of familiar with the art world, explaining, ‘this project, I hope, will leave a print not only on the streets but also on the minds.
