Lights and Perfections

work by Casey Carsel

December 2, 2023 – January 14, 2024

On View Sundays
11 A – 2 P

Opening Reception

Saturday, December 2nd
4 – 7 P

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. 

In conjunction with Lights and Perfections, you can read Casey's short story/essay For the Healthy and For the Dead here. This text and the eponymous excerpt available IRL at Comfort Station were typeset with love by artist and graphic designer Unyimeabasi Udoh.

Note: the right-hand column scrolls independently. If you're having trouble, make sure to hover or tap on that side of the page.

Related Programming presented by Casey –

Bring your current project in during this sewing circle time for social making. Whether you’re starting a new project, putting the finishing touches on an old one, or somewhere in between, drop in for some collective accountability, shop talk, and counsel (as requested). 

The session will begin with a small technical walkthrough of the current Comfort Station exhibition, Lights and Perfections, with the artist, Casey Carsel, and then shake out into open making time. Communal dye pot and small nosh provided.

CRAFT NITE is a queer exhibition and event space run out of a two-car garage in Ukrainian Village. Expanding on a history of queer and feminist craft circles, CRAFT NITE aims to be a conduit for support and connection for up-and-coming artists and craftspeople in Chicago.

At this gathering, attendees will work together with the leaders of the Jewish Museum of Chicago to envision the Museum’s ideological and practical framework, exploring questions such as what it means to build an institution while upholding a core set of liberatory, anti-zionist, and non-hierarchical values. 

This session, held in conjunction with the current Comfort Station exhibition, Lights and Perfections, is open to all and will begin with a candle-lighting for the 7th day of Hanukkah. Small nosh provided. 

Please RSVP to jewishmuseumchicago@gmail.com to confirm participation.

Statement of Solidarity with Palestine

This show was, mostly, created before October 7. It is impossible now to look at the works, to think of these amulets—of fear and the kind of power born from fear—without seeing the events of the past month and since 1948. That is why, here, now, I call for an end to the occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza.

I refuse to support the weaponization of my community’s grief and fear. I refuse the enactment of a genocide in my name—a genocide that is a culmination of a mountain of loss experienced by Palestinians across decades of dehumanization, dispossession, and displacement. 

The 75-year-old settler-state of Israel is an artifact of antisemitism—a colonial project founded by the West to shrug off the burden of the millions of Jewish refugees from the shoah and to bolster their own interests in the region. It began with violence and at the expense of Palestinians, and has continued that way for nearly a century. Many Jews, traumatized by millennia of persecution, nevertheless staked their faith on it. They believed that safety meant being a nation among nations, and that landlessness was weakness. But if this is strength, if this is tzedek (justice), I want no part in it. 

It is not a coincidence that the most Jews killed in one day since the Holocaust were killed in this supposed safe land. These attacks wouldn’t have occurred without the social conditions of Israeli apartheid. The safety of one group will never be permanently gained at the cost of another. The state’s violent actions, as per Talmudic scholar Daniel Boyarin, “threaten to empty Jewish existence of all meaning, to make hollow the resistance for two thousand years to being dissolved into the majority.”

I am a diasporist Jew, a jew of doikayt; for me, the home of Jewishness is in diaspora. Israel is not the Jewishness I believe in. I love my people. It is out of love that I make this statement against the forces of our own self-destruction—even as I risk having many in my community turn their backs on me, or worse, as a consequence. I do it because I see that the struggle against antisemitism and the struggle for a free Palestine are intertwined. 

Tikkun olam (to repair the world) must begin with working to repair what our own have shattered. Teshuvah (repentance/return) must begin with returning what was wrongfully taken from the Palestinian people in our names. I call on you, my readers, my fellow Jews, to join the fight for Palestinian liberation.

No one is free until everyone is free. 

GET INVOLVED –
Follow Jewish Voice for Peace for updates and calls to action. 

Acknowledgements

Thanks, Mum :') Additional infinite gratitude to my belovèd Tāmaki-Kepa bitches: Jasmin, Niamhy, Matavai, Quishile, Fe’ao, Bronte, and Kini. To Pierce and David. To Phillip and David. To Unyime and Addy. To Jack and Lorenzo. To Anne. To Sasha, Olha, Clemens, Lucy, Andrii, and all of my Ukraine loves. To Lyudmila at the New York Public Library. And, of course: 

To the remote sources of life and death revealed. 

To the dust of the well. 

To the rabbi-poets in whose mouths I put my words and whose names have, over the centuries, become mine. 

To Sarah and Yukel. 

To those, finally, whose roads of ink and blood go through words and men. 

And, most of all, to you. To us. To you.