Join us in celebration of the opening of Casey Carsel’s solo exhibition, Lights and Perfections.

Lights and Perfections emerges from and expands upon the images, objects, and words that Jewish communities have historically designated as protective and powerful, and the stories invoked therein. How do the symbols and the amulets that house such stories hold and move a people’s identity, and what histories might they reveal here and now? How do they envelop a community’s fears, its resources, its wider world?

Casey began this series while they were a Fulbright Creative Writing Grantee (2021–22) in Ukraine and, subsequent to the full-scale invasion, in Poland. During that time, they were preoccupied by the shapes in which Jewish histories remain present despite the death, destruction, and forced disappearances of the past centuries. Moved through and around by contemporary inhabitants, they sought to discover how those histories inflect the stories we (us, them, everyone) tell about ourselves, and how they are rewritten in the telling.

The exhibited works were made possible with the support of the Fulbright Program as well as a New York Public Library Short-Term Research Fellowship.

Casey Carsel is a Jewish maker and writer drawn to the sharp beauty of the fragments of history that tumble down to the present moment. In their experimental and craft-based practice, they seek to untangle the ways in which cultural narratives have been woven in the Jewish diaspora. How do the stories conveyed by traditions, artifacts, and landscape shape identities and create communities? What is cherished and how? In their work, they look to open a space where, as for the generations that came before and for those who will follow, stories become homes.

Through such socially inflected objects, histories, and materials of communication as garlic, the Holocaust, and jokes, Casey’s works have unraveled the intentions and implications of storytelling practices both overt and covert. They find in fiber an especially rich field for these investigations, as a medium that is so much a part of everyday life—a medium that is almost always near us, touching us. They seek to discover how such surfaces absorb and reflect the events that occur around them, and how the history of the medium alters the stories that they decode and recode.

Casey’s textiles have been presented by Co-Prosperity (Chicago), RM Gallery (Auckland), and Blue Oyster Gallery (Dunedin), amongst others, and their texts have been published by magazines and galleries including Ocula Magazine, The Seen, West Space, and Clark House Initiative. Recent grants, fellowships, and residencies, including a New York Public Library Short-Term Research Fellowship, a Fulbright U.S. Creative Writing Grant, an Individual Artists Program Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, and a StudioWorks residency with the Tides Institute & Museum of Art.

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