By Keren Moscovitch, April 10, 2025
A thin line of small black-and-white passport photos articulates the front gallery at Higher Pictures, producing a disorienting experience and a tangible emptiness—a faint gesture of presence. Expanding into constellations, a series of expressive aesthetic interventions arise from the visage of a Black youth, a boy on the cusp of an odyssey. Each image is dotted with paint, beads, and intriguing aggregations of material. Myriad historical and cultural references imbue the 322 objects that make up Keisha Scarville: Passports 2012–2025 with depth and meaning, producing a conversation through time, memory, and the delicate building blocks of identity.
Scarville’s practice embraces the multiplicities and contradictions of personal history, especially that of the migratory subject who crosses borders and puts down roots while collecting tendrils of the self. The series speaks of hope and a father’s vision, seen retroactively in the eyes of his sixteen-year-old self and reimagined much later by the hands of his first-generation daughter. As a Guyanese immigrant in the 1960s, Scarville’s father followed a ubiquitous path toward a land of promise, during a period of personal and societal transformation. History is often seen as genealogical, searching for roots in material remnants to construct lineages and timelines. Scarville’s work is genealogical in its deconstructive tendencies. It reconstructs and repeats, stepping into footprints frozen in time that reveal only traces of their source and destination. Her return to her father’s first passport photograph mirrors the historical wanderings of her own diasporic inheritance.
The identity document is inherently political—a confrontation with authority that reflects and perpetuates subjectivity in relation to a state. It produces a referential identity disconnected from the emotional and psychic realities of the subject, unfolding into a narrative of hope and disappointment shared by many who live on the margins of affiliation. Yet Scarville speaks of her father’s pride and commitment to his American self. In response, she weaves a tapestry that releases the static photograph from its ideological weight and allows the image of her father—and all he represents—to participate in the full imaginary of America, engaging her father before she herself existed, before his identity as “father” became fixed. Some images emerge as haunting representations of anonymity. In one, his eyes and mouth are obscured behind ovals of white paint. In another, I am reflected to myself in the small circular mirror placed over his face, making me complicit in his deletion. The continual erasure and reconstruction of his subjectivity is both captivating and confronting.
Repetition is central to the series, as elements like dots, stripes, stars, beads, and color fields return throughout. Liquid brushstrokes recall the Guyanese flag, producing a watery rendition of the youth’s face, obscured by the fog of memory—an abstract connection to a land. Deep blues, golds, and purples evoke regality, the celestial and the aquatic. Earthworms, octopus’ arms, and teeth appear as appendages, imbuing the boy with the wonder and grace of a fantastical creature. In some images, the youth’s face is nearly obscured by hands, legs, hair, and other faces—cut and recombined into chimeric forms that embody ancestral connections to African deities and Afro-Caribbean heritage. In others, archival fragments of media ground the series in contemporaneous Black experiences of protest, conflict and celebration. Objects like cowrie shells and tribal masks speak to the economic and spiritual roots of Black subjectivity and the oceanic passages that haunt Black histories. The visual vocabulary here is so multifaceted that no glossary could fully capture it, imbuing the series with the power of infinite signification.
While many archival projects revolve around the past and its absences, Scarville interrogates the present—specifically the presence of her own diasporic identity through the interpellated gaze of her father’s younger self. She poses questions about her own power, Blackness in America, and the broader condition of personhood: the tensions between being and nonbeing, existence and erasure, history and memory.
Keren Moscovitch is a multimedia artist and scholar. She holds a PhD from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts and is on the faculty of Parsons School of Design at The New School. Her volume Radical Intimacy in Contemporary Art was published by Bloomsbury in 2023.
KEISHA SCARVILLE "Passports" 2014. Courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures.
KEISHA SCARVILLE "Passports" 2016. Courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures.
KEISHA SCARVILLE "Passports" 2017. Courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures.
KEISHA SCARVILLE "Passports" 2020. Courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures.
KEISHA SCARVILLE "Passports" 2024. Courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures.
KEISHA SCARVILLE "Passports" 2024. courtesy the artist and Higher Pictures