Dispatch is pleased to present Public Address, a project by artist Vicente Razo consisting of sentences smuggled onto the covers of familiar celebrity gossip magazines, suburban home furnishing catalogues, and department store fashion brochures. In the process of requesting and receiving these printed materials through the mail, Razo creates a space to inscribe concerns relating to technology, language, faltering ideologies, and mass culture.

This is the third offering in our inaugural spring exhibition program for the Dispatch Office.

A series of selected magazines, catalogues, and brochures requested by Razo over the internet either as free trial subscriptions or promotional material will be shown on the walls of Dispatch. Substituting brash phrases and fragments for actual names in the recipient address box, Razo employs a gesture that is both tactical and concise within a defined space. The Sears catalogue arrives addressed to ‘Dan Graham’s Cash’; People magazine to ‘Guy Debord Crying’; and the Sax Fifth Avenue mailer to ‘Karl Marx in Hell’. Both locating and critiquing Situationist strategies, Razo claims these freely circulating printed materials for his own means of production. By inserting his mechanized graffiti in the first line of the address block, each mass-produced glossy is rendered into reflexive objects, drawing on the relationship of the addressee to its immediate visual, material, and cultural context. Fitting within the means of production, each series of work concludes when the limited trial subscription ends or when his stand-in “recipients” are dropped from the mailing list.

Razo states, “These texts — inserted in the subject address of the publication — create industrially produced originals. In the context where the sentences appear they form a bizarre article, a nano science fiction story in an odd item.”

Vicente Razo received his BFA from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and MFA at New York Univiersity with further studies at Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Past exhibitions include MUCA Contemporary Art Mexico University Museum; Jose Maria Velazco Gallery; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and La Panadería Gallery among others. Lives and works in New York City and Mexico.