"At first, it was just something to keep me occupied while waiting on the subway." (he carried a razor used at work) and discovered that unlike the cardboard posters in the subway trains, the advertising posters on the subway platforms were printed on a self-adhesive material that could be stuck back down after being torn or cut out. He began to play with available images and text to create humorous "mash-ups" of advertisements. In 2008 alone, he has created over 200 manipulated underground posters in NYC subway. He compares the creation of poster "mash-ups" to
hip hop "
freestyling" on a microphone. He does not have preconceived notions of what the work will be ("I don't have anything planned…go there, see something, get inspired and do the work"), but uses the available images, often in a way that relates to current events. One commentator noted: "The pieces generally have a critical edge to them, making comments on the state of society and on the advertisements themselves." This can be explicitly political (as his pieces on
Sean Bell, "IRAN = NAM", "Obama Drama," and Gaza), or a more general send up of celebrity and corporate culture. Poster Boy has been called the "Matisse of subway-ad mash-ups," Culture reporter Ben Walters has said of his work "Poster Boy's work straddles two boisterous artistic subcultures:
street art and
culture jamming." "The overall goal for Poster Boy is to inspire others. I'd love to see people take up the Poster Boy model and create change within their environment." Poster Boy has collaborated with
Aakash Nihalani, a street artist who uses brightly colored electrical tape to create geometric patterns, and has worked on large outdoor monochrome pieces covering illegal NPA billboards with
Jordan Seiler of the Public Ad Campaign. Poster Boy's work had recently grown in scale and he has applied his technique to large billboards. He seems to have been unaware of the somewhat similar and earlier billboard work of the UK group
Cutup. In March 2009, a major installation of subway advertising by the
Museum of Modern Art at the Atlantic / Pacific subway stop in Brooklyn, consisting just of reproductions of works shown in MOMA, was doctored by what was claimed to be "the mysterious Poster Boy collective" along with
Doug Jaeger of
thehappycorp. The cutups included part of a Goodyear tire appearing to be floating with
Monet's
waterlilies. The initial Poster Boy work was all illicit, and he claimed "I don't want to make any money off of it. I don't want to bring it into the galleries.". ==Legal issues==