"ELECTRODOMESTICOS" AT THE STARVING ARTIST STUDIO GALLERY

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, Aldama #209, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

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