The Persistence Of Stillness
Casey Joiner’s Housekeeping at Institute 193 in Lexington, KY
Casey Joiner, Palliative Care, 2025, archival pigment print, 20 x 24 inches
Sunshine streams through sheer curtains.
A storm brews on the horizon.
There, we sit and we wait for what is to come.
What lies within the stillness of waiting?
What can be found in the anticipation, and eventual arrival, of overwhelming grief?
In Housekeeping, her solo exhibition at Institute 193, New Orleans–based photographer Casey Joiner traverses a landscape of laborious emotion, gripping tightly to the fragility of memory. She documents a journey both real and imagined, exploring the loss of her father in 2023. More than documentations of grief, these photographs prompt us, as viewers, to notice the devastation and beauty that can be revealed in the minute, mundane details of our daily lives.
Installation shot from Housekeeping at Institute 193
Casey Joiner, In The Truck Forever, 2024, archival pigment print, 36 x 45 inches
In Joiner's photographs, she memorializes the connections of home, between the self and family, acknowledging how fragile they may become in the wake of grief. Through the act of remembering, misremembering, and image-making, her representations of these relationships shift constantly. The exhibition text describes the images as “truthful, but not always factual.” They provide the viewer with a myriad of truths in conversation. The truth of peace and serenity, of lying down in your father’s pickup truck with the windows down, as in In The Truck Forever (2024). Alternatively, they explore the truth of our mortality, like stumbling upon a dead bird on the concrete as we walk past, as seen in The Plain Sense of Things (2024). These are imagined scenes, created, composed, and captured with intention, yet are no less real and truthful than our own memory. The physical and emotional sensations conjured are both manufactured and honest. Vital, and congealed, as toes pressed against a cold car window.
Exploring a collective experience, Joiner’s isolated subjects and tight framing draw the viewer into the intimate, interior space of grief. However, Joiner does not focus solely on the uniqueness of her own experience to illustrate a linear narrative of struggle, loss, and grief. Instead, she frames these images as spaces of contemplation, detaching them from a specific time and place. Through highlighting the seemingly mundane scenes that we stumble upon daily, Joiner allows the moments within the images to emerge from her own memory, outside of the limits of time and geography, serving as universal sites of grief, of loss, of hope, and of stillness for the viewer.
Casey Joiner, Both Things Can Be True, 2023, archival pigment print, 40 x 54 ½ inches
Like a series of deep breaths, many of the photographs showcase a cyclical repetition of rising and falling. In Breathe Normally (2022), Joiner creates a clear push and pull within the image. For the fallen balloon, there is little air left. Rather than fall to the ground, it remains tied to the other balloons on their ascent. Those two balloons bear the weight of the deflated balloon, carrying it up towards the sky, despite the fence and gravity holding them back. Despite difficulty, despite obstacles, there is an attempt to continue. The journey may not be easy, but we persist.
Joiner continually emphasizes the perseverance and persistence that exists within the stillness of grief. The notion of “housekeeping” and the day-to-day upkeep of the self rises in the exhibition as an emblem. A lasting symbol of love and loss. All of These Fragments (2024) represents this necessary, yet often difficult, act of care and maintenance. Seemingly minute tasks, washing our hands, taking care of ourselves—our homes—become crucial in these moments. Within that space, Joiner invites us to see the life that loss and death can bring into being.
Most of the subjects pictured are moments or spaces of mundanity. Forgotten corners, overgrown vines, piled up trash; the torn edges around us become central. These photographs act as a frame in which we are invited, and subsequently forced, to stop and examine the world around us. We sit in this stillness and things fall apart. Soon, they come together. Life and love in continuation, most especially after the collective cataclysms of death and loss.
Casey Joiner’s exhibition, Housekeeping, is on display at Institute 193 in Lexington, KY through December 20, 2025. A monograph of Housekeeping is forthcoming from Fall Line Press.
Casey Joiner, A Kind Of Violence, 2024, archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches
