In “Casserole Culture,” Melissa Joseph Redraws the Geography of Home

Melissa Joseph’s practice has long been tied to her diasporic experience as a first-generation Indian American, with family memories informing a body of work shaped by themes of legacy, labor and migration. Born in St. Marys, Pennsylvania, to a mother from Pittsburgh with Irish roots and a father from Kerala, India, Joseph creates works that gently reveal the tensions of cultural displacement, inherited trauma and identity in flux while foregrounding the quiet grace of care.

In “Casserole Culture” at Charles Moffett in New York, Joseph turns her focus to growing up in rural America, acknowledging how that environment shaped her identity, perhaps more than any inherited longing for, or sense of belonging to, her family’s ancestral homeland. “I’m really interested in how your regional background shapes your identity, almost more than your national identity,” she reflects as she walks Observer through the show. “I think a lot of the identity conversations happening are on a national level, but it’s more specific. I feel Pennsylvanian. I wanted to capture that.”

With her distinctive needle-felting technique, Joseph isolates and portrays the mundane details of that daily life: cars pulling into a garage, a plate of curry on the table, her father’s hat resting on a wardrobe, the remains of a dinner party and the peculiar patterns of wallpaper meant to brighten life in that rural setting. Together, they speak to the ordinary lives of hardworking people writing a new chapter in a new country. “Casserole Culture,” a term Joseph coined years ago while trying to explain her rural upbringing, captures the hardy, resourceful, community-minded values that surrounded her as a child and that she still sees whenever she returns.

One work depicts the house in St. Marys where Joseph grew up. She remembers spending hours shooting hoops at a homemade plywood backboard whose painted square was placed arbitrarily. “The contractor made it from plywood and I think he just painted a square on it that didn’t even work,” she recalls. “The square matters: if you hit the corners, the ball will go in. But not that square, because he just made it randomly.”

Her focus is not the idealized American Dream, but the human reality behind it. “I feel like there are many layers of being categorized as South Asian, or being from a diaspora,” Joseph says, reflecting on the multicultural reality of contemporary America. “People who came here when my dad did, in that period after the Immigration Act of 1965, had to go some places. They had to take jobs that were less favorable, but they were able to do it anyway.”

Although her family history remains present, relatively few people appear in the exhibition. Much of the story unfolds through houses, everyday possessions, neighborhood details and shared rituals, including a candy that members of her community made together. More than her individual history, the focus is on the experience of an entire community, with all its complexities and contradictions. “I was with these people whether they call you the N-word, whether they keep me perpetually as an outsider or they embrace me warmly. It doesn’t matter; we’re all there. We’re all in the same school.”

After a difficult period in which mourning her mother made it hard to focus on her work, most of the exhibition came together over the past eight months, Joseph says. One of the first pieces she made now hangs on a brick wall: a found fragment of a boat into which she has inserted a subtle felt narrative. Titled Bavarian, the work takes on an almost animated quality, turning the found object into a peculiar, faintly comical character.

A recent residency in Scotland proved crucial, not only in helping her recover her inspiration but also in reconnecting her with nature and the kind of informal community she associates with her childhood. “I was in nature, and I grew up in nature, but I had forgotten while living in New York. I really relied on people’s kindness when I was in Scotland, to share information, knowledge, to let me into their lives,” she says.

Her chosen medium, wool felt, heightens this sense of both care and labor. Tactile, soft and quietly absorbent, it collapses the boundaries between sculpture and image, particularly at this scale, becoming the ideal sensory embodiment of her desire to preserve the emotional residue of fleeting everyday moments that seemed so ordinary but, as they accumulated, came to define a life.

Joseph still works by hand with a needle, but she has deliberately changed the scale of her work. “I wanted to level up,” she explains. “I didn’t want people who had seen my show three years ago to come in here and be like, ‘Oh yeah, I saw this before.’” That desire emerged during another residency in San Antonio, Texas, where her studio, a former car showroom, offered enough room for very large drawings and for a work depicting her parents dancing that measures roughly 9 by 12 feet. Working in such generous conditions showed her what was possible. “What I needed was to understand I could unlock this, because once you can do something in ideal circumstances, then you can figure out how to do it in less ideal circumstances.”

Joseph learned to produce comparably large works in her much smaller studio by laying them out on the floor. Scale is now bound up with the viewer’s capacity to enter a scene. She still finds certain intermediate sizes effective but feels that smaller formats are no longer immersive or intimate enough.

Joseph resists describing the exhibition as nostalgic. Her aim is to revisit those places and moments and bring them to life again, as a way of processing them and making peace with the parts of herself shaped by the people and places that formed her. After recent losses, this new series serves as an exercise in reorientation: understanding where she comes from, how she still belongs to that world and how she can embrace the person those experiences have created. Enlarging details to life size or beyond rematerializes those moments, creating images that serve as anchors for questioning where a person belongs. Her needle-felt images allow memories to be held and embodied physically, culturally and affectively across bodies, generations and time. Memory operates here not merely as a record of what has been lost or displaced but as a way of sustaining a sense of place and belonging that extends beyond generations and geographies.

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