Exhibition of large-scale paper doll compositions by Charlie Wallace, guest curated by Steph Neary, opening as part of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's Gallery Crawl.
Charlie Wallace opens his new exhibition, The Stars Are Watching, at 707 Gallery on Friday, October 30, and it's going to be running through April 11. The show is guest curated by Steph Neary, and it's built around the kind of work Wallace is best known for: large-scale, meticulously rendered paper doll compositions. If you've seen his work before, you know the drill—he takes the visual language of celebrity culture and builds it out into these detailed, life-sized figures. This time, though, he's working from a specific set of blueprints.
For this body of work, Wallace turns to the Major Arcana of the tarot—the sequence of 22 cards that have long served as a symbolic system for mapping human experience, transformation, and fate. He reinterprets those archetypes through the lens of contemporary celebrity, translating each card into a carefully constructed likeness of a cultural icon. It's a strange, specific intersection: the ancient, mystical imagery of the tarot meeting the glossy, recognizable faces of today's fame. Seeing those two worlds side-by-side is where the whole thing lands.
Wallace is a founding member of VaultArt Studio, a Pittsburgh-based non-profit and a project of Achieva that provides a professional studio environment for artists with disabilities. His practice has always played with the way we look at celebrity, and this show continues that, just with the tarot as the framework. The scale is a big part of the experience—these aren't small pieces you glance at; they're large compositions that you really have to stand with.
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The exhibition opens as part of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's monthly Gallery Crawl, a Halloween-themed night of live music, art openings, and exhibitions across the Cultural District. It's a good way to see it—you can catch the opening and then keep moving through the other shows that night. The gallery is at 707 Penn Avenue, Downtown, and admission is free. The Stars Are Watching runs from October 30 through April 11, so you've got plenty of time to swing by if the opening night doesn't work for you.
