In Margaret Welsh’s art, popular culture is the opiate of the masses. The photographs, video works, and installations in a recent show couched her cunning plays on pop culture’s soporific side in wry retransmissions of modes and messages from years past. The works’ retro ambience clearly riffs on a distinct period of American cultural history, loosely definable as the ’70s, but the artifacts she teasingly evokes have analogues in contemporary culture, suggesting that the needs they seek to fulfill—needs of release and escape—have never left us.

Pure Moods (all works 1997), a neon piece placed in