Sean Horton (Presents) | 515 W 20th Street New York, NY
March 24, 2022 - April 23, 2022
Beyond the Mountains — a New York solo debut of Madjeen Isaac is a tender offering of utopian urban living. It is a celebration of Caribbean-American ancestry, attitude, and community through an astute observation of urban sprawl.
In her latest series of paintings, Isaac assembles magical realist scenes that hypothesize their existence by hybridizing her ancestral homeland of Haiti with her hometown Brooklyn. The layered compositions bustle with kineticism and burst with flora and fauna, depicting Black and Brown people in scenes of activity, abundance, leisure, and communality.
“If someone had X-Ray vision and looked into the pre-war buildings, they would see all of these Caribbean households,” states Isaac of her Flatbush neighborhood. She was born and raised in Brooklyn, a borough which is home to the second largest community of Haitian-Americans in the USA. The body of work, ranging from 2020–22, can be regarded as a visual diary, capturing an idyllic snapshot of a quickly-gentrifying Flatbush. Read more here.
Text by Sadaf Padder.
Photo credit: Matt Grubb