Christopher Gambino, Installation view of The Christmas Show at Below Grand, 2025 (photo: Frank Wang; Courtesy of the artist and Below Grand)
I wish I hadn’t purposefully visited Christopher Gambino’s window installation, The Christmas Show at Below Grand. Not because I wish I could erase it from my mind, but I dream of stumbling upon this festive furniture crime scene by happenstance. A momentary look to my right while walking down Orchard Street. A glance at a velveteen red curtain, tied back with silvery tasseled ropes. A double take at shattered glass and scattered hydrangeas. A shocked eye-pop at the tossed luxurious furs, crumpled and strewn bedazzled stage costumes, flung pills, and an ashtray filled to the brim with red lipstick-stained cigarettes sitting on a vanity, alongside perfume bottles, a champagne flute, and makeup. This is obviously the aftermath of some rabid, raging explosion of violence. Yet, there’s no blood dripping from the smashed green champagne bottles. No gore from a brutal beating. Only the bodies of broken chairs, legs jammed into stockings and heels. One lies prone, (no)face-down on the shard-covered ground. The other falls backward, slumped into a wooden chest. Divas down!
How would I have even tried to comprehend this chaotic scene without any context? The remainders of an active NYPD investigation with Christmas lights used rather than police tape? Proof of a band of roving Lower East Side vandals with a taste for Golden Age of Hollywood camp? Santacon gone awry? Glamorous trash used as anger management? A window display by the troubled child of the restaurant supply store that houses Below Grand in a desperate attempt to channel compulsive violent thoughts into psychotic outsider art?
Sadly, no matter how much I write to Santa, I can’t go back and unlearn about the installation, even though I feel I lost out on that initial confusion. Conversely, I arrived armed with the installation’s title, which meant that I could tell The Christmas Show celebrated the true meaning of the holidays: merry mayhem and maybe, murder!
Christopher Gambino, Installation view of The Christmas Show at Below Grand, 2025 (photo: Frank Wang; Courtesy of the artist and Below Grand)
I mean, isn’t the Christmas season ripe for meltdowns? Just the song “Jingle Bells” is enough to send anyone teetering over the edge into a foam-mouthed tizzy of terror! Think about it: Starting with the rampaging hoards of deal-seekers on Black Friday, the holiday season is chock-full of potential eruptions of brutality. All that anxiety over picking the right gifts, the wild-eyed holiday shopping spree, the Christmas cookie sugar buzz coupled with the breakdown booze blast of Martha Stewart’s alarmingly alcoholic eggnog, frustrated fights with tangled Christmas lights, the sticker shock of purchasing a Christmas tree in this economy, and the endurance test of conversing with family members who just learned about Nick Fuentes’s virginity from Piers Morgan compresses into a gift-wrapped pressure cooker, a ticking time bomb flocked with holly and tinsel. Hey, there has to be a reason why the holiday has inspired so many horror movies, from the garbage-day trash classic Silent Night, Deadly Night to Alice Maio Mackay’s fresh spin on the genre with her perfectly titled Carnage for Christmas. Of course, it just wouldn’t be Christmas without the masterwork of Christmas cruelty: Divine’s Dawn Davenport pinning poor Mama under the tree after she didn’t receive her desired black cha-cha heels.
Curated by Jesse Firestone, Gambino’s The Christmas Show isn’t as overtly Christmas-y as those seasonal slashers or Female Trouble’s festal freakout. There’s no bludgeoning with a Christmas tree. No killer Santas. No victims suffocated by bows or punctured by ornaments. In fact, other than the Christmas lights, which could be used off-season, the only evidence I can find of seasonal décor is one of the only objects that remains standing in the bedlam: a cutesy, vintage-looking Christmas card, featuring a wee little angel lugging a gigantic star in a cart, with the greetings, “Bringing Christmas Wishes Your Way!” Clearly, the players in this mise-en-crime-scène got more than wishes—or perhaps this massacre WAS someone’s Christmas wish! Yet, there is something strangely seasonal about the installation. Perhaps it’s that red curtain, which, along with the more muted reddish floor, gives Gambino’s theatrical staging a gift-wrapped jewelry box feel. Or maybe, it’s simply the notion of a window installation in December that instantly recalls tourists gazing into the fancy-schmancy windows on 5th Avenue before watching a NYC loon wade through a fountain outside of Radio City.
The best department store window dressers don’t simply concern themselves with whatever clothes they want to move before the new year. The Krampus is in the details. Gambino excels at this exquisite, fantastical world-making within a relatively small glass enclosure, constructing an altar to overwrought backstage narcissism. The mirrored vanity and the cracked full-sized mirror are surrounded by a calamity of destroyed diva elegance and spiraling starlet pill popping, including prescription bottles that remind me of Marilyn Monroe’s scripts ghoulishly on view at the Hollywood Museum in Los Angeles. Almost every included object sent my synapses firing in a wave of camp ecstasy: a black sequined dress begging to be donned by a shimmying, jazz-handed Liza, a quirky white and gold rotary phone that looks out of place not clutched in Lypsinka’s hands, and the fancy little perfume bottles à la Sequinette Jaynesfield’s deliriously overstuffed sets in her short films like Good Queen: A Fowl Revolt. A few objects seem oddly out of place, though, like the feather duster perched in a corner as if forgotten by Ethel Eichelberger’s Minnie the Maid and the pristinely white kitchen timer posed, unmauled, on a shoe box. Did someone leave the oven on?
Christopher Gambino, Installation view of The Christmas Show at Below Grand, 2025 (photo: Frank Wang; Courtesy of the artist and Below Grand)
Because Gambino so precisely arranged the installation, a narrative emerges: a star mangled by wannabe fury. You can just hear the crash of the champagne bottles over the head of whatever preening star was groggily sitting at that vanity, deciding what perfume with which to douse herself while mixing booze and pills. I evoke wannabe fury because the furniture corpses, the actual sculptural objects within Gambino’s larger installation, shed light on a class difference that may have motivated this crime. Or really, their shoes do. The black shoes dangling from the toppled trunk chair have seen better days, scuffed and worn on the bottom from overuse. Conversely, the prone figure in the center of the installation sports a fancier pair with red heels (while not actually being red-bottomed Louboutins). These antagonists, one significantly wealthier than the other, had some kind of fatal falling out, even if viewers don’t know the exact spark that sent the whole holiday ablaze.
The show’s press release reveals more of the storyline. The Christmas Show represents the aftermath of Gambino’s never-performed play, also titled The Christmas Show, which takes place backstage before and during a performance, yes, ALSO called The Christmas Show. Confused yet? Well, it gets better. The Christmas Show (the play) features two characters, The Star and The Imposter, here represented by the cracked chair corpses. The Star is also Christopher Gambino and a visual artist, given that The Christmas Show (the in-show performance) is in front of a big-name curator rather than a hotshot producer. I know this because Firestone generously gave me a peek at the play’s script, a delightfully unhinged spin on Jean Genet’s The Maids if, instead of two maids repeatedly role-playing killing their boss, one was bellowing theater queen standards from Liza, Babs, and Sondheim in a delirious daydream of usurping The Star’s, well, stardom. This explains both the feather duster and the kitchen timer, a safety measure swiped directly from Genet, carefully set to avoid being caught in the act.
However, I don’t want to give too much of Gambino’s play away. Not because I want to lord my insight over the rest of you, but because not having access to the entire plot or understanding what exactly I was looking at was my favorite part of the installation. Without that direct knowledge, Gambino lets viewers’ imaginations run wild, and mine sure did. For me, The Christmas Show felt uncannily familiar, imbued with a bizarre sense of déjà vu like I was looking at the set of a film I couldn’t quite recall. In The Maids, Genet encourages a collision course of reality and make-believe in the reperformance of murder (so does Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley’s new film Room Temperature, in which the amateur home haunt transforms and masks a real haunted home, which I feel compelled to mention here). The Christmas Show play also mines the space between truth and fantasy in which the theater itself lives. In contrast, The Christmas Show installation pits fantasy against fantasy, leading me to wonder, over and over again, what movie, TV show, or music video Gambino was reinterpreting. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Was it All About Eve? But Eve didn’t have to off Margo to take her place. Was it some other backstage drama? Showgirls? Black Swan? Garbage’s “The World Is Not Enough” video in which bot Shirley Manson kills and replaces IRL Manson? Or was it as simple as that jam-packed ashtray looking like Sarah Palmer’s chain-smoker side table in Twin Peaks? I never quite figured it out. Instead, The Christmas Show left me with the eerie feeling that I was regarding a scene I had seen before, even though I hadn’t, like the warm glow of a false Christmas memory of roasting chestnuts, silver bells, and simmering jealousy boiling into holiday ho-ho-homicide.