Solo Exhibitions
Come as You Are, This Is Our Battle Too
Smack Mellon | 92 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn, NY
September 28-November 17, 2024
Come as You Are, This Is Our Battle Too is an exhibition of recent works that centers healing and transformation. Following a battle with an unexpected health diagnosis starting in Fall 2023, the artist embarked on an inward journey exploring the depths of her own spirit, reflecting on the guidance, prayers, and support of her community. Isaac’s reimagined landscapes represent places that the she has occupied emotionally and mentally while grappling with grief, anger, and sadness, and seeking hope, love, and grace. Illuminated by various sources of light and celestial beings, her paintings allude to her ancestors, who are constantly present. The exhibition serves as an invitation for viewers to come to the work with their own battles.
Gonna Search the Sky for New Horizons to Unfold, 2024, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches.
Courtesy of Smack Mellon. Photos by Etienne Frossard.Beyond the Mountains
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.
Abundant Surprises From the Sky, 2021, oil on canvas, 42 x 54 inches.
Photos by Matt Grubb.