PLUSH GALLERY

After a six year hiatus, Plush Gallery is reopening in its Dragon Street space in the Design District of Dallas. The first exhibition will be a group show featuring artists with connections to Mexico City and its sister city of Nezahualcóyotl.

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For the last 14 months, gallery owner / director Randall Garrett has been living in Mexico City. The connections formed there led to the decision to reopen Plush Gallery at its Dallas location this fall. He joined a group of artists from Nezahualcóyotl, a rough and tumble working class city of two million people on the eastern edge of Mexico City, and together they presented the exhibition “Mi Barrio Me Respalda”.

 

These artists form the nucleus for Ánimo, the debut exhibition of the new Plush Gallery. Ánimo is a slang term in Español, something along the lines of “go for it”. It is in this spirit that the artists from Neza approach their life and work, engaging the culture of their city through participation in tianguis (open air markets), arte urbano (street art), forums, roundtables and exhibitions in the local pulquerias and cultural centers.

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Sara Cardona is a Dallas based artist and educator who was born and lived her early years in Mexico City as the child of jipitecas, the Mexican hippies, or counterculture movement. Her abstract collage work evokes the design complexities of both technology and Mexican culture.

 

Salve César is co-founder of BORDO, a magazine and collective which promotes the art and culture of Neza. His self-portrait photos, based in his training as a dancer, focus on the aestheticization of the male body.

 

Randall Garrett has produced a body of collage and arte urbano posters, building on the street level energies of Mexico City. They are a “mezcla”, a remix that plays with gender, identity, culture, and history.

 

Yaudiel Jiménez is also co-founder and editor of BORDO magazine. In her writing, she uses a feminist perspective to consider the role of women in Mexican culture, and the absurdities and street-level drama of living in Neza.

 

Brian Livoight is a young artist based in Neza. His animations and arte urbano posters have a playful exuberance, all while expressing a deeper sensibility about life, death, and persona, rooted in the typologies of Mexican history.

 

Alan Méndez is a muralist from Chimalhuacan, a city of grit emerging from the edges of Neza. His “Cacocalitlakuilografia”, a personal linguistic and calligraphic style, explores iconography and language, mixing pre-Hispanic and contemporary Mexican street influences.

 

Román Olayo Estrada creates mixed-media works from his studio in Neza. They incorporate diverse elements from the tianquis, sex and costume shops, and street life. He likes art films, and paints his nails black.

 

Pablo Tonatiuh Alvarez Reyes is a video producer and photographer from the Bosques de Aragon section of Neza. His complex and beautiful ensembles raise awareness of the dark side of Mexican politics, exposing tragic moments of government, corporate, and drug cartels abuse of the people.

 

Alba Vida is an artist, writer, and designer from Neza, who lives in Mexico City. Her “Bastard Poetry” painting series assimilates poetry fragments onto the picture plane as a faceted abstraction, in an expression of cosmic spirituality.

 

Jazz music vocalist Kimberly Nicole Williams will perform a set at the opening reception, as well as talk about her recent experiences in Mexico City. Her work is featured at http://www.knicolejazz.com .