In 1951, at age 16, Keisha Scarville’s father obtained a passport in his native Guyana; in 1967, he immigrated to the United States, where he has lived ever since. In 2012—after conducting interviews that explored his relationship to his adopted home—Scarville made a copy of the photo from that first passport and adorned it. Thus began an ongoing series, now on view at Higher Pictures in Dumbo. In “Passports 2012-2025,”  the most comprehensive presentation of this work to date, the Brooklyn artist’s ingeniously altered images are installed in a line along each wall of the gallery’s first room, and billow out into a large oval shape in the second, creating a powerful sense of her project’s duration.

A passport portrait both emphasizes the sitter’s distinguishing features and conforms them to a strict set of rules: The gaze must be frontal, ears must be visible, nothing must obstruct the face. In this way, the traveler’s identity becomes an iteration of a genre and is subtly flattened. Scarville dramatizes this sameness by reproducing her father’s photo over and over—322 times so far. And 322 times, she imbues these identical images with uniqueness, using watercolor and acrylic, beads and glitter, magazine illustrations and other collage elements. In one photo, her father’s mouth and eyes are whited out, in a second, a wishbone is affixed to his face, in a third, his visage is virtually occluded by swirls of paint.

Scarville’s interventions, whether reverent or playful, push beyond the visual, transforming these diminutive two-dimensional pictures into tactile objects. They become icons, talismans, things to be cradled in one’s hand. But at bottom, her inspiration remains an image—a youth at the start of life’s journey, looking at the camera and toward the future of an immigrant’s dream.—Margaret Sundell

https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2025/04/16/keisha-scarville-alina-bliumis-aaron-gilbert