Recess by Keisha Scarville at CPW

Born in Brooklyn to Guyanese immigrant parents, Scarville reflects her feeling of displacement in her work; her photographs and installations create scenes that connect memory with emotion, often using her late mother's clothing and textiles.

Overview

The exhibition, titled Recess, features the work of 2024 Saltzman Prize winner Keisha Scarville (American, born 1975). Scarville makes photographs that consider her personal experience of in-betweenness, exploring notions of diaspora, transformation, belonging, and loss. In her photographs, she creates spaces, stages, and still lives, often using clothing and textiles belonging to her late mother.

When Scarville invokes her mother’s presence in her works, she creates alternate, liminal places that engage both memory and the possibilities of abstraction. In Recess, Scarville refers both to the hollow space beneath a flat plane and to any temporary pause or suspension. In this way, Scarville continues her exploration of thresholds. Neither here nor there, thresholds are spaces of becoming; they mark moments of “passing through,” suspended instants that are full of potential and prospects of the unknown. For Scarville, shadows function as these types of spaces.

They are not only dark shapes that lack light and clarity, but also deep, productive zones where alternative temporalities and in-between narratives reside. In her photographs and installations, Scarville activates the shadow as a form in ways that require closer looking, deeper feeling, and the active negotiation of being.

Recess is accompanied by a limited edition artist’s book published by CPW and produced by 1080PRESS.

Keisha Scarville is the inaugural recipient of the Saltzman Prize, awarded annually by the Saltzman Family Foundation and conceived by CPW Trustee Lisa Saltzman. The prize awards an emerging photographer $10,000 and a solo exhibition at CPW. Selected through an international nomination and jurying process, the Saltzman Prize supports CPW’s commitment to emerging artists. The next Saltzman Prize winner will be announced in May at the 2025 CPW Vision Awards.

Founded in 1977 as Center for Photography at Woodstock, CPW is a not-for-profit arts organization with a dual mission: to support artists working in photography and related media, and to engage audiences through creation, discovery, and learning. At the heart of CPW’s mission is programming that is community-based, artist-centered, and collaborative. To foster public conversation around critical issues in photography, CPW offers exhibitions, workshops, artists’ residencies, and access to its Digital Media Lab. In 2022, CPW relocated from Woodstock to Kingston, NY. In January 2025, CPW will open its newly renovated headquarters–including a photography museum, and an educational and community center– in a 40,000-square-foot factory building at 25 Dederick Stree