Casey Joiner

This project began long before I was aware of it. Going about everyday life while navigating the complexities of long term illness and eventual loss of a parent, I find myself occasionally in a dissociative dreamlike state. Housekeeping is a traversal of a confusing landscape of remembering and misremembering. In grieving the loss of a loved one, we are often confronted with a bizarre palimpsest of hallucinations. Memories—or what we think we remember—get lodged between surreal imaginings that can’t literally be true but nevertheless seem to convey the psychic weight of loss better than the “facts” of our experience. Indeed, to tell the truth of grief, we sometimes have to make things up. In accepting the limitations of my own memories, I fill those gaps with imagined scenes. This work is a meditation on grief, memory, identity and familial bonds.

Casey Joiner is a photographer in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her practice is loosely rooted in the documentary tradition, beholden to the actuality of her immediate surroundings. Her approach to image selection is intended to be non-hierarchical, and she believes the productive capacity of the photographic medium lies in its accessibility and availability to a wide array of interpretations. Her pictures have formalist conviction, democratic vernacular and a magical realist attitude.

Joiner’s work registers many of the complications of life in New Orleans; a place world-renowned for hospitality and ravaged by tourism, steeped in cultural mythologies and woefully under-resourced, surrounded by natural beauty, and in grave ecological danger. Her work is informed by her affection for places full of peculiar nonsense and deep struggle, slow things, long standing traditions and growing up in the Deep South. Matter-of-fact in their sentimentality, her photographs speak in the abstract of memory, grief, celebration and perpetual care.