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.
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.