STREET ART: MAY’S LANE
BY AMELIA GROOM
While in other cities, like Melbourne, the streets provide a constant canvas for paint, poster and canvas art, Sydney’s graffiti police seem to do too good a job at keeping the bricks bare. Enter May’s, an ongoing street art project in a St Peter’s laneway that showcases a diverse range of street art talent, and is fully blessed by the surrounding community of residents and businesses. Each month, May’s curator invites a new bunch of street artists to come and work their skills on one of five 3 X 2.5m installed panels, though many of the pieces extend beyond the panels to the walls, street signs and roller doors along the laneway. Previous guest artists have included Dlux!, the Die Laughing Collective, Kill Pixie, and internationals icons like Mr Cartoon. At the end of the month new canvases go up for the next wave, but all panels are kept for exhibiting elsewhere in the future, providing an ever-growing documentary of a grassroots art scene that is largely overlooked by galleries and art institutions. In the words of Tugi Balog, founder of the project ‘I started the May’s project because I wanted to provide street artists with as permanent a record of their work as they were likely to get. I wanted to provide somewhere for artists to compare styles, show off their skills and hopefully produce a shining example of what a few people with aerosol cans can do for a generic, drab lane in the big city.’
May’s Lane is a two minute walk from St Peter’s station, and of course, is open 247. www.mays.org.au
