Headed to NYC tomorrow to help with the installation of the Hole Gallery’s first official pop-up exhibition at Cappellini in SoHo on Wednesday. If anyone is in the area, come on by! Here’s the official press release:

The newly appointed associate directing duo of The Hole Gallery, Derrick Harden and Laura O’Reilly, curated this conceptual project, Christmas in the Summer, “a bi-coastal 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 gift wrap and tied up with big red bows, and an audio guide made by the curators offers your only intimation at what might lie beneath.”

“Christmas in the Summer is an art show inside an art show, featuring Kathy Grayson’s (former director of Deitch Projects and owner of The Hole Gallery) hidden paintings of abstracted and hacked pixilated 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.”

“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.

Location: Cappellini 152 Wooster St between Houston & Prince, SoHo NY
Open to the Public: Thursday August 18th-Monday August 23rd
Hours: Weekday 11-7pm, Weekend 12-6pm