Curators Derrick B. Harden & Laura O’Reilly, are set to debut the first official “Hole Pop-Up” exhibition at Cappellini in SoHo, New York on August 17th, 2011. In a conceptual curatorial project about the experience of art, Laura and Derrick pair Kathy Grayson (former director of Deitch Projects and owner of The Hole) with N.Levi Lewis & Frederick McSwain (Cappellini/Poltrona Frau Group) for Christmas in the Summer, an art show where you can’t see the art for sale. The exhibition highlights both Cappellini’s mission to explore design between imagination and reality, and The Hole’s pursuit to fill the hole in the creative downtown community. All paintings are wrapped in green gift wrap and tied up with red ribbion, and an audio guide made by the curators offers your only intimation at what might lie beneath. Viewers walk into the bright red showroom like an eager kid on Christmas Eve who has to wait to open their presents until the next day– or in this case when the show is over. Christmas in the Summer is an art show inside an art show, featuring Kathy Grayson’s hidden paintings of abstracted and hacked pixelated stills ripped from television clips. Harden’s choice to constrain the viewers ability to actually see the paintings is a reaction to the free proliferation of imagery both in the art world and culture in general. Christmas in the Summer encourages the public to reconsider the machinery of the art gallery system that processes, packages and exports imagery chiefly to an unreachable exclusive income bracket. Conversely, the exhibition features paintings that reclaim available media images to personalize and re-imagine them, but then forces collectors to purchase the work if they want to ever see what it is.
Don’t worry, you won’t be left totally in the dark. Just because you can’t see the art, doesn’t mean that you won’t see the art: the visual show of pre-gift-wrapped paintings by Ms. Grayson is accompanied by a looped 20-minute audio tour of the exhibition. The central conundrum of the exhibition is the decision of the collector to ever make the painting and image public, thus controlling information and highlighting the luxury of privacy in our mobile media obsessed cultural moment. They may choose to never share their present with anyone.
The fun doesn’t stop there: pre-order Dear Derrick & Laura O’s debut album Christmas in the Summer on www.xmasinthesummer.com -which of course you can’t hear! You’ll just have to take their word for it.
NEW YORK: Christmas in the Summer
HOURS:
Open to the Public: Thursday August 18th-Monday August 23rd
Weekday 11-7pm, Weekend 12-6pm
LOCATION:
Cappellini
152 Wooster St between Houston & Prince
New York, NY
Press/Gallery Contact: poke@theholenyc.com 212 466-1100