Dominique Porter Gallery is pleased to present The Reality Show, a solo exhibition of work by Topanga, California-based artist Cara Chan.

How do you make sense of a disordered world? Some join cults, become political extremists, or turn to AI or the occult. Others dissociate, freeze or fawn. The Reality Show explores how we cope by embracing fatalism, fantasy, and sycophancy or by searching for innocence and cosmic order. It presents a set of symbols for the tumult that surrounds us.

The exhibition features five hand-carved stone and cast metal sculptures surrounded by a series of bronze wall reliefs based on the artist’s late aunt’s Tarot deck. Using ancient techniques like investment mold casting, direct carving, and pointing, Chan joins repurposed bronze, aluminum, alabaster, and marble in a series of busts mounted on plaster pedestals. Her practice draws on apotropaic traditions in archaic stone carving, inspired by temple grotesques from around the world. The sculptures complement the classic Rider-Waite-Smith divination deck with new archetypes: the seer, the influencer, the jester, the demon, the baby, the future.

This is the first time Chan has worked with the tarot symbol set. After inheriting her aunt’s deck, she found that it was covered in handwritten notes, evidence of a lifelong stenographic habit. These notes, and the tarot’s ancient psychological language, reflect archetypal patterns Chan has explored for years in stone—timeless imprints of the human condition. In Chan’s work, the intense and irreducible texture of the present rhymes with the tarot’s historical figures and cosmic themes. In the gallery, the harlequin, king, and magician reappear as influencer, politician, and tech overlord. The characters in this show embody the perennial temptation, sacrifice, and transformation that animate the cast of the tarot.

The nesting dolls in the show’s eponymous sculpture are made of busts cut down the middle. Cartoonish, Dadaistic, and medieval in design, they are disfigured by maniacal grins, with glass formed eyes and spheroid breasts made of pink selenite. In Secrets (2026), heavy makeup alters perception, concealing blemishes made of Mexican opal set in raspberry alabaster. Seer (2023) hollows out classical figuration, rendering a doomer gaze and a hidden scream in white Carrara marble. In Rotting (2026), a similar Janus mask is made of an unhinged rictus smile and a tearful expression carved in negative space and casting internal shadows. Industrial high modernism informs Spiralism (2026), which nods to consumer robotics, AI cults, and nature’s fractal geometry. Biological references like a corpse flower and fossilized ammonite draw in notions of cyclical and deep time. At the heart of it all is a newborn child, giving us a fragile moment of grace amidst the chaos.