Alejandro Gómez Arias | Gina Arizpe | Patricia Carrillo Carrera | Virginia Colwell | Arcángel Constantini |  Iván Edeza | Fritzia Irizar | Jason Mena | Roy Meuwissen | Yoshua Okón | Miguel Rodríguez Sepúlveda Curator: Bárbara Perea In the wake of the recent and tense renegotiation of this three-way treaty, the growing humanitarian immigration crisis, and draconian border policies enacted by the current US administration, this exhibition presents a critical and transhistorical analysis of economic exchange in the region through the lens of contemporary art practices. The artists included in the exhibition explore the links between Canadian mining interests and organized crime, the effects of Big Sugar on the post-NAFTA diet, the necropolitical instrumentalization of populations in service to the drug trade, and other entangled undercurrents of this pact. Virginia Colwell’s blue-ink rendering of Arturo “El Negro” Durazo’s mansion on the coast of Guerrero, Mexico provides a point of entry to the intricate and entangled relationship between Mexico’s corrupt power structure and the illicit drug trade with the United States, which began in earnest in the late 70’s under the auspices of pioneering cartel leader Rafael Caro Quintero. During the Reagan administration, the CIA brokered several covert gun-running and drug-trafficking operations to bolster guerrillas fighting in Central America for which it relied on Caro Quintero, one of the key operatives in this scheme, who in turn was closely linked to his protector and business associate, the then chief-of-police of Mexico City, “El Negro” Durazo. Durazo amassed a fortune from his illicit dealings, most prominently exemplified by his classically-inspired ‘Parthenon’ mansion, an extravagant and eccentric tribute to his ambitions modeled on the architecture most representative of power and democracy in the US, which it both echoes and mocks. The scale of Durazo’s operation paled in comparison to the transnational incorporated interests of cartels in the post-NAFTA period, which nonetheless are rooted in Quintero’s early efforts and those of his successors. Incidentally, Colwell’s father was the FBI agent responsible for Durazo’s eventual capture in Puerto Rico.   Works such as Miguel Rodríguez Sepúlveda’s Elegy and (Re)Percussion offer a glimpse into current circumstances linking local government to criminal activity, or more pointedly, underscoring how governmental bodies are increasingly indistinguishable from criminal organizations. Using die-stamp letters, his inscription of the phrase I do deserve abundance on a series of one peso coins...