Love Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry at Leather Beach is a site specific store by Christian Holstad. Leather Beach is modeled on high end clothing boutiques and Leather sex clubs and concerns marginal urban space, nature fetishism, bodily and sartorial appearance and subterranean countercultural bliss.

At Leather Beach, formerly Prince’s Deli which recently offered falafels and gyros to eat, on the corner of 43rd Street and 3rd, Holstad utilizes the democratic institution of a New York deli as a found object. Leather Beach is a fictional / real clothing store (as a gallery is a store) perhaps of slightly dubious repute. (The refrigerated display suspiciously stocks a single bundle of carrots with dynamite wicks on dirt, one of which has slipped to the grate below.) Reflecting Holstad’s interest in archeology, aspiration, failure, and the underbelly of things, Leather Beach accentuates the skeleton of Prince’s Deli - closed and abandoned for an undeterminable length of time; its ample signage, drop ceilings, slightly ornamental wood cabinetry, florescent lighting, peeling wall paper, empty shelves, linoleum flooring, protruding gas jet and rat traps - in homage to the derelict past of the sanitized city itself imagining a time when garbage danced cyclone like in the wind on the street. Prince’s Deli, a familiar place one may have stopped in at some point: is now a haunting latent vessel awaiting super development. To protect its precious square feet, it is sealed like a grave, and this crypt like quality endows it with horror and loneliness.

Holstad’s store is entered through a revolving wooden door with beveled panels suggesting a private hotel, or old fashioned men’s club with opaque screen windows rent by ghostly hot yellowed cigarette breath and traces of moustache. The traces of faces and opacity of the screens is reminiscent of the ephemeral quality of Holstad’s fragile newsprint drawings. In keeping with the store’s vacancy, two flickering florescent lights bend, droop and flicker as though melting from the ceiling and we are greeted by a garment bag aloft shoulder height on a stand wound in chain (like Marley’s ghost dead as a door nail in lock box chains), evocative of a body bag or the reticent guard in a luxury shop. Inside within the industrial remains of the Deli, clothing is displayed in a style perversely mimicking an avant-garde monastic approach to men’s haberdashery (featuring ascetic angular cuts in shades of grey, military boots, big steel jewelry on leather cords and the sound of industrial music) where fashion is a stringent subculture as it formally encodes subculture.