The portrait has been an essential part of photographic history, unfolding from an isolated act of entitlement—an asset of privilege—to a ubiquitous routine of modern life. Portraiture is a measure of our cultural values and how the consideration of “self” has evolved, emotionally and socially. Arguably, the portrait’s omnipresence has escorted narcissism from a rare clinical diagnosis to a daily given. And the genre is hydra-headed, encompassing both the extravagant constructions of celebrity and cosmetic culture and the banality of the photo ID badge, dangling from a lanyard.
The exhibition Keisha Scarville: Passports 2012–2025 proposes a consortium of these two diametric forms of portraiture, of the indexical and the expressive, that of a dull bureaucratic proxy and one endlessly interpretive and chameleon. Over the course of fourteen years, Scarville has embellished copies of her father’s passport picture, of which more than three hundred are here for viewing. Regardless of quantity, the palm-sized pictures maintain all manner of invention, and the ornamentation prowls decorative tradition, cultural narrative, and occasionally, administrative redaction. The pictures march in rapid formation as an eye-level frieze around the gallery walls, then burst into a constellation, a chorus of identities. It is a garrulous gathering.
Many of her compact “interventions” interrupt the face, some with a squirming cubistic bouquet of body parts and some collaged fragments of recognizable events or locations; others are marked by patterns that stipple the surface and suggest the celestial. Dots dominate. Glittered necklaces abound. Variously, small objects are affixed to the print as talisman: a wishbone here, beads there, jewels, and in one, threads that pierce the surface and become a string section of tears, a jigsaw puzzle piece. Words appear. One is reminded of the Polaroid self-portraits of Lucas Samaras and those of Ellen Carey, whose early work camouflaged her photographs of herself with layered marks. The eyes of the father are occasionally concealed or, indeed, removed, and the face is blackened. There are those in which he is festooned as a carnivalesque figure and some of showbiz style, and two cosmetically, with lips of red. In two astonishing pictures, the surface is covered by gold, the face silhouetted like that of a hallowed medieval icon or the glint of a contemporary prayer card. Throughout, one is reminded of the idea of the mask, both as an intrinsic part of the portrait, but also its tribal and theatrical function, and of ritual.
Not all of Scarville’s engagement is additive. Some interruptions revoke detail and are liquid, the paint blurring and blotting, the face becoming spectral, a ghost. One is like a Shroud of Turin. The father disappears, seemingly erased by the fragility of memory. In our present of common technological facial manipulation—both as an image and as a physical phenomenon (and the dreadful technology of facial recognition)—some of the pleasure of Passports is in the tactile maneuvers of craft and a sense of the artist as scavenger.
Keisha Scarville has developed restless bodies of work that engage collage as not just a familiar pictorial style but as a historical reckoning: the present as formed by overlapping fragments of the past and collage as a weaving of archive. It is a kind of diasporic arbitration, of autonomy versus the legacies of place and ancestral lineage, and of renewed urgency in this ugly American passage in which citizenship has become corrupted and vulnerable. One trusts that the work here is not an elegy.
Passports is an ideological project of postcolonial identity and the promise of immigration—of a “new world” as an empowerment. But importantly, it is a daughter’s playful interpretation of a father’s long-ago identity and an imaging of his past and its transition from stoic to pliant: a recognition of an individual’s dimensionality. It is a dyadic and experiential endeavor, encompassing the passage of time, his from the age of seventeen and she in the last twelve years, a daily gesture. It is a collaboration of joy and purpose.
https://brooklynrail.org/2025/04/artseen/keisha-scarville-passports-2012-2025/