“Housekeeping” by Casey Joiner

Institute 193 is pleased to announce the opening of “Housekeeping”, the latest exhibition of New Orleans-based photographer Casey Joiner’s record of the strange and nonlinear landscape of loss. Created over the past several years while navigating the long illness and eventual passing of her father in early 2023, these images move between still lifes, interiors, and portraits — both real and imagined — reflecting the distortions of grief and the fragile persistence of memory.

Intimate, often domestic, and sometimes surreal, this work contemplates the regression to childhood that comes with the death of a parent and the shifting line between memory and imagination. It also explores the concept of “home” as both a physical and generational space, familial bonds, personal identity, and what lingers after loss. The title “Housekeeping” comes from the idea of care and maintenance — of a home, of a family, of memory itself. It also nods to Marilynne Robinson’s novel of the same name, which meditates on longing, absence, and the fragile beauty of human bonds.

While Joiner began by photographing the intimate spaces and objects that defined her childhood, this documentation evolved into a broader record of absence and return. Slipping between the documentary and the dreamlike, the images presented here are fragments of a life, stitched together like memory itself — truthful, but not always factual. Losing a parent is a universal but deeply private experience. Housekeeping offers an intimate window into that experience, while also touching on the broader questions of time, memory, and what we carry forward.

The show will open on Thursday, October 30 and run through December 20. An opening reception will be held from 6pm-8pm on the 30th, with Joiner in attendance. Please join us!