Gregory Carosi - House of Cards
Jul 26, 2025 to Oct 26, 2025
About
House of Cards, a site-specific installation commissioned by Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, explores the precarity of the built environment, and by extension, of contemporary life. Existential in its philosophy, and theatrical in its staging, House of Cards is a meditation on the relationship between the grounded limitations of human experience and our ongoing desire to transcend the here and now in search of something better.
Taking as a starting point the cardhouse constructions made possible by a deck of regular playing cards, the exhibition loosens and enlarges this frame to incorporate large-scale architectural elements that, like the series of arches, pedestals and tiled floors found in the artworks themselves, walk a fine line between a sense of groundedness and collapse. Within this precarious array, moments of beauty, precision and playfulness emerge as reminders of our inalienable habit of making the world our own. It is that world between survival and transcendence – the real world – that this exhibition seeks to embody.
Taken together, these monumental structural and pictorial elements create an immersive theatrical experience where viewers must tread carefully through a landscape that appears as if it could topple over at any moment. An experience in which complex lines of sight give way to interactions with individual works whose layout is designed to draw viewers so closely to the painted surface as to feel they could enter into the world on show.
Fabricated in aluminium and making use of everyday materials including house paint, charcoal and chalk, the House of Cards paintings oscillate between vibrant colour and the restrained use of monochrome; between sterility and soulfulness. Experimental in both its construction and scope, House of Cards breaks new ground in an arts practice that has been intimately engaged in exploring how we move through built and natural environments in response to the physical and emotional atmospheres they can create.
We live in an era of deep uncertainty. Some of the pictorial arches that appear throughout the exhibition remind us that the arch is also the cave, and that civilisation and survival are rarely opposites; they are in fact mutually dependent terms. What role can art play in such an era? What role an audience? House of Cards invites viewers to become the figure in the landscape in pursuit of an answer to these questions.
Gregory Carosi, House of Cards, 2025 (acrylic on aluminum)
