Photography

Art and Identity in the Caribbean

While Keisha Scarville investigates her father’s migration through collage, Kosisochukwu Nnebe uses chlorophyll printing on banana leaves to highlight image impermanence. Their works, which were created while at El Espacio 23, recontextualize colonial roots while exploring American and Caribbean identities through Miami’s influence.

Kosisochukwu Nnebe. Detail of studio during WOPHA artist in residence program at El Espacio 23, 2024. Photo: Gaby Ojeda. Courtesy of WOPHA

Keisha Scarville. Pages from her book “lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound”, 2023.

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by Isabella Marie Garcia

Wed 14 Aug, 2024

Caribe
USA

Banana leaves discarded on the side of a street in Allapattah, Miami, but now cut into neat squares, bearing the portrait of a Black woman. The same passport photo of a Guyanese man staring stoically at the camera, repeated across rows and columns, but each bearing a different intricate hand-drawn design on top. The details noted above are the immediate first visual impressions found upon entering Kosisochukwu Nnebe and Keisha Scarville’s studios at El Espacio 23. The two artists were in-residence at the private collection for the month of March, in partnership with Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA).

Scarville’s ties to Guyana as a first-generation individual living in the United States is unraveled through personal investigations of her father’s migration to the US. The passport photograph is a vessel in which to understand the hyphenation of identity and the endless rabbit hole that thresholds contain in their in-betweens and beyonds. Her father’s first passport photograph is the template for a decade-long series that interrogates connotations tied to migration and immigration across borders, specifically in repeating the same passport image across rows and columns. Each individual photograph weaves Scarville’s touch as a manipulator of the archival history, using collage techniques and hand-drawn designs to add to or remove from her father’s profile.

Nnebe’s life until the age of five in Nigeria, and eventual relocation to Canada, manifests in her work as a lens-based artist. Specifically intrigued by the counter-archive of flora, Nnebe is actively exploring the banana plant as a domesticated co-dependent plant that requires human intervention in order to reproduce its seed. The alternative photography process of chlorophyll printing is what Nnebe is utilizing the banana leaves for in witnessing the impermanence of image-making on an object that does not require chemicals in order to reflect back on the human mark. Discovered during the artist’s time at a residency in Jamaica, the duality of what a banana plant is in terms of where it originates in Southeast Asia all the way to its contemporary presence in the Caribbean lies against Nnebe’s studio wall like a story waiting to be read.

Keisha Scarville. Untitled, 2015. Photo: Gaby Ojeda. Courtesy of WOPHA.

How do we recontextualize deep colonial roots as the contrary, as being tools for reclamation to empower Black gaze?

There’s also the duality of the actual image as imprinted on the banana leaf by proxy of the sun activating the process, and once held up to the light, witnessing how the image transfers to both sides of the same leaf. “If you’re only photographing one side, you’re losing the fact that there’s another image being rendered that plays with this idea of a positive and a negative,” Nnebe elaborates. “There’s something there about not being able to see both images at once. You’re being forced to move to see both images, which plays into how installation artists see space in relation to their work.”

Between Scarville and Nnebe, Miami is physically closer to the Caribbean than their bases of Brooklyn and Montréal, which aids in direct engagement with the questions they are constantly asking themselves as artists. What does it mean to feel more like an American than Guayanese? How do we recontextualize deep colonial roots as the contrary, as being tools for reclamation to empower Black gaze? While Scarville’s digital black and white compositions, and Passports series, speak to deeply personal family ties and the meaning of being the first-generation kid in a home, Nnebe’s lens-based conceptual presentations are those that root into sculpture as a medium to rotate context. They speculate a world where who was once the victim is now the ruler. Yet there’s a tie between Scarville and Nnebe in reclaiming histories told to one as worth questioning and prodding at—not to be taken at face value—but rather reinterpreted and truly understood.

Keisha Scarville. Pages from her book “lick of tongue, rub of finger, on soft wound”, 2023.

The strength of light with Miami’s sun is undeniable, and the closeness to the Caribbean’s complexities within the city’s neighborhoods reverberates a calling back to work that doesn’t have to be created within this residency’s walls to find its own sense of belonging. It’s the ability to return to work created elsewhere and resist the desperate search for materials in a new city. Rather, Scarville and Nnebe take advantage of Miami as offering repurpose and reuse in the form of discarded materials in the surrounding suburban streets, mimicry of conversations had with immigrant parents when listening to locals speak in languages you don’t understand, and the distance from home necessary to think of one’s own creative affinity in temporal communities.

The 2024 WOPHA Artists-In-Residence Program is supported by the Pérez CreARTE Grants Program (CreARTE) by The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation. The program serves to award local, national, and international women and nonbinary photographers with opportunities for studio visits, artist presentations, classroom conversations, and exhibitions, along with connecting them with South Florida’s academic and creative community.

On September 23rd, 2024, Green Space Miami will present the WOPHA Artists in Residence exhibition, a dual presentation by Keisha Scarville and Kosisochukwu Nnebe curated by Amanda Bradley, WOPHA Associate Curator of Programming. The exhibition will be activated in conjunction with the 2024 WOPHA Congress during October and will remain on view through November 10, 2024. Expanding on their residency in Miami, the artists explore personal projects that use photography as a way to investigate relationships of identity, materiality, transformation, and landscape. The 2024 WOPHA Congress, titled How Photography Teaches Us to Live Now, is a creative convening and exhibition series taking place at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and locations across South Florida from October 23-26. This year’s Congress highlights the indelible contribution of women and non-binary photographers in contemporary art and initiates discussions about women, photography, and pedagogy as a foundational step towards the establishment of a dedicated educational institution for the study of photographic practices, criticism, and historiography.

Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded by art curator Aldeide Delgado and artist Francisco Maso to research, promote, support, and educate on the role of women and those identified as women or non-binary in photography. 

Isabella “Isa” Marie Garcia is an independent arts professional, writer, and photographer living in her native swampland of Miami, Florida. For the past six years, Garcia has worked with local and national arts-based organizations such as Burnaway, Ten North Group, LnS Gallery, and UNTITLED, Art. Garcia is a 2023 Locust Projects Wavemaker Research and Implementation Grant Recipient for her photo-based project titled What Happens When the Dust Settles?. More information on her work can be found at isamxrie.com.