– CANCELLED –
In this one-hour virtual conversation, current Comfort Station artist Casey Carsel and craft and social practitioner Quishile Charan will talanoa/redn mamaloshn about the commonalities and divergences in their textile practices, their approach to their cultural histories (Jewish and Indo-Fijian, respectively), and their wider contexts.
In relation with December Exhibition –
Lights and Perfections
work by Casey Carsel
December 2, 2023 – January 14, 2024
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.