Step inside the brain of artist and set designer Gary Card, creator of grotesque, hypersaturated worlds for the likes of Comme des Garçons and Lady Gaga, and you’ll find a tangled archive of busted clown heads, mutant trinkets, VHS tapes, and, most recently, a weird little bear-shaped cake made out of foam roses. His latest exhibition, “Gathering Dust,” has taken over the Soho space of Plaster—a creative studio and art magazine founded by Milo Astaire and Finn Constantine—like a psychedelic garage sale on acid. It’s a maximalist dive into Card’s obsession with discarded things and DIY world-building.
The exhibition is split over two floors: downstairs, a dense, immersive curiosity shop-meets-studio-meets-shrine to Card’s hoarding instincts; upstairs, a quieter but no less mad collection of sculptural busts, something Card has become known for creating, made entirely from masking tape. “Milo just said, ‘I want some heads,’” Card grins. “So I gave him heads.”
The whole thing is a maximalist’s wet dream, featuring layers of old projects, abandoned props, nostalgic nonsense, and “trinkets” he’s been working on for years. It’s as Card puts it, “slightly retrospective and introspective simultaneously.”
The show is deeply personal. “Originally, it was just going to be a set,” he says. “But it ended up making more sense for the items to come from me directly. So a lot of it is from my own collection—weird toys, artifacts, old paintings, sculptures I never finished. Some of it never found a proper home. Some of it I just couldn’t bear to part with. And now it all gathers dust.” Hence the name. “It’s a bit of a piss-take, too,” he admits. “It’s the antithesis of the whole summer optimism thing. It’s nihilistic. Claustrophobic. A cluttered overload. A physical manifestation of my ADHD-addled brain.”
The line between life and work is more of a smudge. “My partner’s a minimalist,” he laughs. “I’m the opposite. He’s always trying to throw my shit away, and I’m in a full panic going, ‘No! That’s a one-eyed gorilla puppet I bought in 2014, we might need it!’”
So yes, his actual studio looks pretty close to the Plaster installation, just maybe slightly less curated. “I live in chaos,” he says proudly. “And that will absolutely be reflected in this space.” The chaos isn’t just Card’s, though. He’s invited a gang of fellow freaks and collectors to contribute, including For Fuck Sake Baby (caps and T-shirts), Unified Goods (AV oddities, books, CDs), Breakdown Comics, and Fairy Go, who’s making a zine and T-shirts just for the show. “It’s got that charity shop energy meets high-concept print studio,” he says. “Nothing is pristine. Everything is intentional.”
Somewhere in this glorious mess is a point about consumerism, sentimentality, the weight of things. But mostly, “Gathering Dust” is about Card giving himself permission to take up space. “Usually as a set designer, I’m looking outward—for a client, for a brand,” he says. “But here, I’m the client. I’m the inspiration. I’m looking inward. Which is weird, and vulnerable, and kind of amazing.”
Also: exhausting. “I’m basically moving house twice for this show,” he adds. “And my flat’s in Brixton. My studio’s in Hackney. Send help.”