![]() Li/mb is on view at Higher Pictures Gallery in New York from Dec. To this end, then, we should look further into our modern practices of dance and music before blindly celebrating them, in order to fully appreciate and understand the truth hidden within. To comprehend and reclaim the atrocities committed, they recreated their own version ofĪ death-trap (limbo), which was unapologetically stolen and popularized in every American home. The trophy in this last image is a strange symbol at first, but it comes with the realization that the flexibility and strength of a people is deserving of more than a trophy. ![]() The transition from youth to adulthood is portrayed through images of a faceless woman balancing a faceless child on her naked lap, or a proud woman holding her baby in a picture frame, as seen in Trophy/Photo. An example of this is seen through the eyes of a modern-day student writing a journal entry on the life of a slave on a plantation in Composition/Journal/Plantation. Scarville balances each story between worlds and pushes the boundaries of each. In Li/mb, this “compensation” gives way to a more personal expansion. In the installments of the Negotiating/Maneuver series, Scarville cuts limbs in two, splits a head from a body and raises one arm above the shadows of two others.Īs Harris understands it, the limbo game is a way to uncover the past, to free the Black body, and to expand into the future. For this reason, I find the irony of each fluid movement depicted in Scarville’s images even more sinister and haunting. ![]() Scarville demonstrates this crossing from a traumatic history and its rebirth through the modern West Indies carnival dance of limbo. “The limbo dance therefore implies, I believe, a profound art of compensation which seeks to re-play a dismemberment of tribes,” Harris writes. Scarville reflects the words Guyanese writer Wilson Harris relates in his essay, “History, Fable and Myth.” Legs bend under an incomparable force, as if swaying to rhythmic sounds. ![]() Scarville focuses on imitating the flexibility of the Black body, which flattens like a spider, and the shadow of an unseen limbo stick in Negotiating/Maneuver (8). Scarville relates these images to the story that is played out in Kamau Braithwaite’s poem “Caliban,” which tells of the historic landmarks that dinstinguish different eras of slavery and the true nature of “limbo.” Instead of water or chains, however, Scarville takes advantage of shadow and patterned textiles to recreate this very literal dark space in history. Split fractions speak to horror on slave ships, where thousands of slaves’ bodies flattened into similarly strange shapes. Popularized in the 1950s during the height of dance shows on television, the limbo game has a more sinister past. Limbo is considered a challenging game of flexibility and stamina. Amid these images is Scarville’s underlying theme of a game, limbo, which was born between these two worlds. Li/mb is also a coming-of-age story for Scarville’s ancestors, and for herself as a Black woman who left her home in Guyana and came to reside in Brooklyn, New York. Her images bridge a myriad of gaps within the dark history of slavery and the Caribbean diaspora. Scarville focuses on overlapping abstract black-and-white textiles with fractured limbs and bodies. At first glance, each image seems like an interruption of the last. Keisha Scarville’s solo exhibition Li/mb weaves a tangle of obscured faces and geometric patterns.
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