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May 10, 2011 – Review
Mario Garcia Torres’s "Cover Letter" at Itinerant, 45 Orchard St, New York
Karen Archey
The Lower East Side is a strange place. Imagine the area a mere three years ago: as the financial crisis loomed, galleries such as Invisible-Exports, Lisa Cooley and Rachel Uffner joined or replaced the efforts of veteran spaces Orchard, CANADA, and Reena Spaulings, casting the gallery district as a more critically-minded alternative to the overtly market-driven slickness of Chelsea. Soon after, as real estate prices fell further and the traction of Orchard Street grew, near-hobbyist boutique galleries popped up and faded, transforming the area into a sort of strip mall for affordable art. One usually vacant space on Orchard Street—which used to house a gallery whose title was writ in Comic Sans and sold National Geographic-style photographs of tigers and elephants—recently contained the pop-up exhibition “Cover Letter” by conceptual artist Mario Garcia Torres. Appropriately titled “Itinerant,” the exhibition project is spearheaded by two blue-chip gallery directors, Rose Lord of Marian Goodman and Mari Spirito of 303 Gallery.
“Cover Letter” comprises two slide projections: a new work sharing the exhibition’s title and an older work, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger, from 2007. The series of slides in Cover Letter tracks Garcia Torres assembling a bouquet while a letter of application …