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The Polyphonic Image
Within Call and Response, Keisha Scarville’s images are portals that engage multiple registers.
Polyphony can be defined as “... simultaneously combining a number of parts, each forming an individual melody and harmonizing with each other.” But how does this relate to photography?
The photographic encounter originates from the possibility of its presence, collecting the world by turning a juncture of time and place into a ‘frozen,’ consumable object. In turn, the observer is engaged in a constant harmonization of their current moment with another that is familiar: latency. Though bound by our socialization of images, symbols, and expression, when one makes from evocation, agency is restored–as the metaphysical is brought into the visual.
Scarville specifically distills visual relationships through fashioning the human form as conjuror. The body, oscillating between identity and the universe, mirrors the pedagogical practice of looking: the entity that controls spatial placement or compositional elements is perceived only through the results of their interaction. In this vein, one asks: “Why is the figure basked in red ?”, “Why does this red figure spatially relate to the cosmos?” and “What should we call this relationship?” The presumed simplicity of one thing placed beside another grounds social formation, yet only glosses the monophonic surface– a sole voice.
Apparatus: The Iteration of Visuality
The visual does not arrive alone; it carries a lineage.
When looking at the archive, one sees the past as their predecessor, but–like an image taken for the future–this connection is uncertain. By opening her visual lexicon to old movie stills, popular media, family photos, and ephemera, Scarville allows every image to sit within the now while supporting another.
In the beginning of the show, four images from Mama’s Clothes glow within a crystalline case. In each frame, black and white forms weave in and out of a centralized bundle through line, contrast, and pattern, while the eye searches for a subject. Then, a twinkle erupts, unveiling the unifying thread, and the illusion falters. Scarville enfolds references of her late mother, fabric, and performance into a link that cannot be reduced to happenstance, but is the cascading of positionality and visual pedagogy. This cacophony materializes loss, while the constructed still life relays a past and a becoming that combines form and conceptual function.
The Spatial Dimension
These images, further encapsulated by a fabric-laden environment, beckon a familiar deciphering between installation and mere representation in a world where photographic reproduction and reality increasingly intertwine. Mimicry echoes from beginning to end, working in the round, enacting a recursivity. In this function, the past, present, and future are rendered into the surface – a place where reality and image coalesce.
So, what does it mean for a three-dimensional environment to iterate on visuality? What occurs when objecthood and reality are rendered illusory? This exercise of working in observation directs Keisha Scarville’s practice and “Call + Response” where the revolving entanglement between curation and photographic practice is questioned.