Mercado Nexo

PHOENIX, ARIZONA - “MERCADO NEXO,” an MFA thesis exhibition by Miguel Monzón, is a retail pop-up shop with an inventory of multi-media commodities and ready-mades. In other words, participants encounter a facsimile of a shop that can be found at a marketplace in west Phoenix.

Through site-specific multi-media installation, Monzón gives rise to a retail experience that draws our attention to the current (but historically recursive) expansion of organized crime into legal markets. Specifically, it focuses on the United States by drawing relationships between organized crime, multi-national corporations, and religious organizations. “MERCADO NEXO” is a metaphor for capitalism that is positioned so that audiences may consider ways of understanding the strategies these organizations share and employ through their historic collaborations with government agencies via our relationships to markets.

This project exploits the idea of “the collab” found in streetwear culture and uses the format to expose our consumption of goods and services tainted and inspired by the violence of these collaborations, while simultaneously enticing participants with products that can be read as cues for further investigation. This strategy ruptures the feedback loop by encouraging participants to examine the reality of our individual connections and our unavoidable complicity in this nexus of individuals, organizations, and transactions.

Exhibition Dates: March 14–March 23
Reception: Friday, March 15, 6 p.m.–9 p.m.
Gallery Hours: Thursday–Saturday, noon–5 p.m.

Image: Display Case Detail Shot