'Electrodomesticos' at the Starving Artist Studio Gallery in Puerto Vallarta Jeffrey Round - A Writers Half-Life
go to original April 8, 2013

Time warps can be fun, especially when they take you back to your formative years. It's also interesting to see those times recreated by a younger generation.

Who would have thought that attending an indie gallery opening in Puerto Vallarta in March 2013 would find me contemplating the ghosts of 1978 as rendered by six visual artists, some of whom were not even born then?

But there they were, lingering on the walls and in the corners of the Starving Artist Studio Gallery. This was not just a slavish recreation of an ethos, however, but an unofficial reinvention of a controversial period in art, one that's not easily refined, like putting boulders in a blender and expecting them to come out smooth and polished.

Yet here was Keith Haring revisited, with traces of Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Wojnarowicz reflected back in thoughtful, intriguing ways, photographic images that Cindy Sherman or Robert Mapplethorpe might have contemplated in the aftermath of punk's corrosive vision.

Here, too, was Pop art without all the irony, and layered over with a queer twist. Even the casual, seemingly artless approach to appending work to the gallery walls (here sometimes painted directly on the walls in DayGlo colours or projected onto a loosely blowing screen) speak of punk and Pop's disdain for things too refined or carefully considered.

Not quite as transgressive as the originals, still it's a brave choice amid all the decorative elements Vallarta churns out endlessly. If you missed it back then, here's your chance to see it now.

The Starving Artist Studio Gallery is located in Downtown Vallarta at Pipila 245. Telephone is (322) 136-6745. The Bucerias location is Lazaro Cardenas 108A, telephone is (329) 298-0492. Email is odder9@yahoo.com. Open Monday-Friday from Noon until 9:00 pm and on Saturday from 1:00 until 9:00 pm. For more information, visit The Starving Artist Studio Gallery on Facebook.

We are a space that supports and promotes the talent, passion and effort of emerging and established artists to develop an emotional and artistic social interest. We collaborate with artists to produce works and exhibitions that generate appreciation of intellectual avant-garde art, to give life to the platform of the modern art wave in Puerto Vallarta.

Although a young gallery, we have a structured team of communication, design, curatorship and an extensive catalog of artists of modern, pop art and minimalist styles, that we promote through the gallery and web space. We create dynamic series of activities for the community that catapult the social interest in art, as art tutoring services for children and adults and auction art events by the same artists members who complement and strengthen the economic development of the most needy.