In her ongoing Passports series, Keisha Scarville reinterprets her father’s first passport photo by layering, collaging, distorting, scratching, damaging, and superimposing the portrait with other images in order to create a collection of transformed images. This series consists of over 70 pieces, all starting with the same passport photo, but resulting in a diverse assemblage of experimental gestures across the surface of the images that examine themes of immigration and citizenship in the U.S. In this exclusive presentation, Scarville will give a lecture describing her influences and current work and facilitate a guided creative exercise where participants will take up her experimental manipulation of archival images. The class will culminate in a discussion of the transformed works.

Participants are encouraged to use copies of their own archival images or source images from the public domain for use in this workshop.

This lecture and engagement series is part of programming coinciding with Aaron Turner's exhibition at Penumbra, Black Alchemy. The lecture and engagement series is inspired by Aaron Turner’s Moves from the Archive, a richly layered book that pulls from a wide array of ideas, influences and traditions. The photographs, which are a part of the larger and ongoing project, represent cultural and familial images, exploring them as both subject matter and material. The result is a formal language that exists in dialogue with legacies of nonrepresentational art in both photography and painting. Turner also challenges assumptions about what it means to be a Black artist working within this tradition – drawing a parallel between racial passing and abstraction.

More information on the event can be found here.