Keisha Scarville “Placelessness of Echoes (and kinship of shadows)”

Baxter Street/ the Camera Club of NY

poster for Keisha Scarville “Placelessness of Echoes (and kinship of shadows)”
[Image: Keisha Scarville "Untitled (branches)" (2016)]

This event has ended.

Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York presents Placelessness of Echoes (and kinship of shadows), a solo show by 2017 Workspace Resident Keisha Scarville. The exhibition addresses questions of place, power, and self-formation within the nature. At times in the photograph we are privy to the body of the artist Scarville, a sole black woman entering the transformative space of the nocturnal American landscape. In these rural environs of the Northeast, outside her home in New York City, she creates objects and images that inhabit the spatial, temporal, and visual ambiguity of darkness. These figural bodies, not quite human, nor animal, nor inanimate articles, unfold as abstract accounts of a nocturnal shape-shifter who becomes part of the landscape around her.

Inspired by Guyanese author Wilson Harris’s first novel, Palace of the Peacock, Scarville mines literature and philosophy on the “possessed, living landscapes.” She enters the environment with her camera, and, not without hesitation, allows her own relationship to the landscape to unfurl. She is an observer, who captures subtle variations in the night as previously concealed elements appear. Through documenting this process of emergence, Scarville establishes a framework through which the geographic complexities of a region — indigenous flora and fauna or artistic interlocutor — could witness its epistemology, history, and narrative and furthermore by knowing transform the darkness of place from an arena for fear into a place of power and belonging. The darkness enfolds allowing the separation between body and terrain to disappear managing to decenter the human as a defenseless prey. Rather than traffic in black and white or a duotone, Scarville highlights reds and golds as well as a blue mystical fogginess of night. Thereby allowing for an alchemic relationship between artist, myth, and history to ignite in this new space, where darkness is no longer inert, but becomes active perception.

Keisha Scarville (b. 1975, Brooklyn, NY) weaves together themes dealing with transformation and the unknown. Working across media, but with a grounding in photography, her work addresses issues of place, memory, and subjectivity. Scarville has exhibited at the Studio Museum of Harlem, Rush Arts Gallery, BRIC Arts Media House, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Lesley Heller Gallery, the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, Museum of Contemporary Diasporan Arts, and The Brooklyn Museum of Art. She has participated in artist residencies at BRIC Workspace, Baxter Street CCNY, Vermont Studio Center, Center for Photography at Woodstock, Lightwork Artist Residency Program, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Scarville is currently an adjunct faculty member at the International Center of Photography.

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Schedule

from June 07, 2018 to July 07, 2018

Opening Reception on 2018-06-07 from 18:00 to 20:00

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