The night before Zach Medler set out to spray-paint Lafayette, a one-story warehouse called Foam City bristled with neon hair and spiked jackets. A street punk band from Boston cranked the volume to 11, shouting throaty expletives while shirtless, tattooed mosh-pitters thrashed on the dance floor.
The place smelled of sweat and cigarettes. Old computers and couches were clustered near the walls, and graffiti — colorful, hasty scribbles, intricate, miniature drawings — was everywhere.
Nestled in the back corner of this alternative studio space/venue is a repurposed garage where Medler, a 35-year-old muralist, keeps his stencils, paste-ups, rollers, rags, plastic buckets, found wood and many, many cans of spray paint. The walls are blanketed with the blacks, reds, yellows and blues of stylized aerosol graffiti. His studio is a mess of color, creation and destruction.
Medler, who is married and wears a baseball cap and a solid tee, has more in common with the street punk than meets the eye. He's a street artist, and he shares with the punk rocker a need to defy the city image as old, white, conservative, Christian and quintessentially Midwestern. Medler wants to "challenge the older guard" and to "bring a younger aesthetic into town."
On a recent Thursday morning, the punk rockers were long gone, and Medler carried his spray painting tools in a plastic bin.
He doesn't like the way things look around town. He walked up to a boarded window near the corner of Ferry and Fifth streets and frowned at the dreariness of sun-faded wood and peeling paint.
"Lafayette just looks like a typical Midwest city. It's brick and tan. To me, tan isn't a color. It's an attitude," he said.
He carried the bin and a 10-foot ladder to the alleyway between Bernadette's Barbershop and Chase Bank, where a team of landscapers had parked a pickup truck and trailer to work on the gardens facing Main Street. He got to work. He was done by noontime. Passers-by hardly noticed the clack-clack-clack of shaking paint cans, the clang of metal on concrete, and the hiss and fumes of paint jetting onto the eggshell-colored wall.