May Lane street art pt. III

Here is the third and final part of Acid Midget's May Lane Street Art Project series.

Today's music selection is 'Wait in the Dark' by Memory Tapes, from his new album Player Piano.

  Wait In The Dark by Memory Tapes 

This mixed media piece stares you in the face as you walk around. There are plenty of 'commissioned' pieces like this throughout the lane and a number of well-known artists have had their work hosted there.

Why are so many murals sombre? Is it because artists use distraught characters for emotive effect? No, I didn't think so.

The lady stencil reminds me of 2026. But as I often get names wrong, I'll save myself the hassle and say this was by Konsumterra.

You can do so much with found objects. This looks like a waving diabetic reindeer.

A crying Mongol.

If you see a cartoon pasted up in Sydney you can bet Jumbo or Zap did it. Looks like Zap did this one.

There was more to this piece than an iPhone lens can capture. I didn't want to stand at a sharp angle to squeeze it in. You wouldn't be able to read it. The irony is now you can't read the whole thing anyway.

Note to self: "Omar, you're a dick."

'Broken Memories' by Will Coles. He also did the next few sculptures.

'Dumb'.

A Postmodern cast of a newspaper stack and, top-left, a can which states "Asahi beer - my plemium bantazy."

You don't even know it, but each day you pack your child's lunch box with a 'soul-less' juice box. Then you get a few grey hairs and a divorce - and the kid is drinking motherf***ing Hahn Super Dry.

Just saying.

That brings these virtual tours of May Lane - one of Sydney's main street art and graffiti hubs - to a close.

Not everything I find on the streets gets blogged, so check out the Facebook page to see the extra bits.

Can we hold hands now?

Fin.

You might also like:

May Lane street art pt. I

May Lane street art pt. II

Newtown street art and stencil series

(Bedford Street, Newtown, Sydney)

"Again. It happened again. I forgot to wear trousers over this fucking garter belt!" - Rupert Murdoch

This stencil is by Ill. Also, I just discovered Bad Cop, an indie/punk/garage rock band out of Nashville, TN. 

Listen to 'Time After Time' as you read this post and join hands with us in rebellion.

 Bad Cop - Time After Time by ROIR 

(Ibid.)

This character looks intimidating, but nothing freaked me out lately like Black Swan. And by freaked out I mean unbelievably aroused.

 (Denison St, Newtown, Sydney)

Now we know Timmy Bongs has crab hands. Great.

 (Bedford Street, Newtown, Sydney)

Ill again. This reminds me greatly of Philip Seymour Hoffman's rendition of Truman Capote.

 (Ibid.)

I wonder what it would be like to lose our bodies. Would we need them in 200 years? By then I assume technology would be so advanced that using the body for manual labour would be inefficient compared to cybernetic replacements.

To put this in context, 200 years ago we weren't far into the Industrial Revolution and machines already began to supersede the manual labour force.

Wait, how did we end up here? Um, fuck it.

 (Ibid.)

Ill once more. Really hope someone begins selling little zip puppies.
 

 (Ibid.)

This figure looks like actor Matthew Newton. Feel sorry for him. He likes the odd line of coke and has 'aggressive' relationships with Australian actresses. If this was Hollywood, his popularity would skyrocket.

 (Lennox Street, Newtown, Sydney)

This mural depicts famous American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. He has, along with Beat writers Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, greatly influenced Acid Midget.

This mural is peppered with the opening lines of Ginberg's iconic counterculture poem Howl, which reads:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix."

He was referring to San Francisco in the 1950s. Sounds to me like Newtown on a weeknight.

Listen to him read it. It's better:

(Ibid.) 

R.I.P. Laura.

(Ibid.)

A patchwork cartoon of Morticia Addams?

(Ibid.)

Spotted these cats around Waterloo and Redfern. I should spend less time chasing pussy and more being with you.

Stencil wall in Chippendale, Sydney has heaps of character

(All photos: Grafton Street, Chippendale, Sydney)

I recently heard about a sweet wall in Sydney from a friend who walked past and 'gushed' over the stencils on it.

I wanted to find out more, so I asked about it on the Acid Midget Facebook page.

Apparently the wall is in Chippendale and was recently repainted.

I went there. It was sunny while I snapped photos, getting a little tan, a little sweaty.

This guy Che walked past as I wiped my forehead.

So dude, you like stencils?
Hell ja, I replied.
It's a pretty cool wall. Oh, I'm Che by the way. As in 'Che Guevara'. I live here.
Sweet, I said. So, tell me...

Che said locals came around regularly to stencil but, because the wall got "a bit messy" with age, he repainted it.

If you look closely, bits of the old wall are visible through the new paint.

Thinking I should move in next door to Che. We'd have block parties every week with our street art BFFs. We'd walk the streets in blotched skinny jeans covering our bony asses and paint the town rainbow while downing bottles of freedom.

Hell ja.

Nice red scooter, but I still don't get why people ride them in Sydney. This is a car city. It's an orge of fumes, rage and mute mouths contorting like angry arsholes.

In the meantime why not 'vote green'? The above stencil appears to comment on the frustrating Federal election Australia just had. Coincidentally, Aussies did send more votes to the Greens. Now, more bike lanes please Bobby Brown.

Soldier: Sir, scaling wall now. Over.
Commander: Good work. Have you spotted any yet?
S: No sir. I've got night vision goggles on and I can't see them.
C: You effing earshole! You can't see because you're using night vision during the day!
S: Sorry sir. OK, I've got day vision goggles on now.
C: You corksucker! There's no such thing as day vision! Who hired you?
S: You did, sir.
C: Ahh forget it. See any of those uckfing street artists?
S: There are too many to count, sir. It's Chippendale. If you gave me a dollar for...
C: Shut up you mutt. Just get down there and complete the mission.
S: Yes sir. Over.

When sitting down to make a stencil that's a cross between a butterfly and a scorpion (Scorpfly? Butscor? Butter-n-scones?) how would you make it?

Draw it out by hand? Source the creatures and work from life? Google search/Photoshop/magnetic lasso tool?

All of the above.

This stencil reminds me of the 911 Falling Man. Sad.

Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in London, England in 1989 and died in Vevey, Switzerland in 1977.

Street artists use scale to surprise passers-by with either sheer enormity or, in this case, a stencil smaller than a brick.

In this stencil Flash Gordon is about to fall from a building in 1930s New York. He clings on for life.

If he falls off will he:

A) Land on the pavement and become a stinking pile of meat?

or

B) Be saved by Spiderman/Batman/Wolverine(man)/Mickey Mouse(man)/King Kong/Donkey Kong/Obama/Lady Gaga/All of the above?

There's always someone watching you, taking photos, stockpiling information.

You're never alone.

You could be walking directly into the frame of an Acid Midget photo. You could be a 55-year-old lady with a packet of potato chips, hurrying to calm your munchies with that mmm mmm salty goodness.

Denham Lane, Surry Hills

Denham Lane is a no hope refuge in a narrow corner of Sydney.

It’s in a quiet residential section of Surry Hills and often empty. The only objects there are stencils, longnecks, half-suckled goonbags and the odd dirty shot glass. All evidence of dead end lives lived in a dead end alley.

This disfigured poem looks like a bible phrase pastiche. It calls with painful urgency to “harvest, teach, intwine (sic), seed, time, learn”. Its incoherence could represent a struggle for unification; a struggle which is failing.

The NT intervention, implemented under the Howard Government, received criticism from indigenous communities for making problems worse.

This stencil could be an attack on the “no alcohol/pornography” signs posted around the NT.

From what I understand, Tjawa is a shortened form of Tjawa Tjawa, an area in the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia. It’s anglicised name is Point Moody. It's one of the most isolated desert settlements in Australia and is also a hub of Indigenous art.

 

What do you get when you cross horses and spiders?

Who knows.

At one point we were in the Northern Territory, reading a bible on horseback, trying to escape spiders.

Now we're in a Columbian coke fight.

Shit. Wouldn't want to get blown away now.

This could just be me, but does this stencil look like Ronald Reagan? Not sure why anyone would make a Reagan stencil.

Practice?

Love the bottom-right skull. Love love.

This trail of turtles leads to the end of the lane. They symbolically walk with us as we find a gutter seat, pop open a 40 oz. and piss our pain away.

For more on Denham Ln check out Darlinghurst Nights.