MEMORY GARDEN

Featuring Madjeen Isaac, Lújan Pérez Hernández, and Aryana Minai

Curated By Sadaf Padder

May 13th - June 17th 2023

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present Memory Garden, a group exhibition featuring artists Aryana Minai, Madjeen Isaac, and Luján Pérez Hernández curated by Sadaf Padder. The exhibition opens Saturday, May 13th and runs through Saturday, June 18th 2023 at Swivel’s new agship location at 396 Johnson Avenue in Brooklyn, New York.

Inspired by the method of loci or memory palace, an imaginary location that can store mnemonic images, we propose a garden: a place we may not know but wholeheartedly feel, a place that we can collectively cultivate.

Memory Garden offers sculpture, print-making, installation, and paintings inspired by lived environments, ancestral homelands, and historical anecdotes. The three third-culture artists keenly observe their immediate surroundings and spiritually charge their work by sourcing stories and items from their diverse lineages spanning Iran, Spain, and Haiti and their familial migrations to cities across the USA. They establish a sense of home and belonging, celebrate resilience, and alchemize bright futures.

Behold the paper-based sculptural portals of Aryana Minai. Minai, whose family migrated from Iran to the US in 2009, draws inspiration from the forms and poetics of Persian architecture, and replicates traditional craft processes like brickmaking in her handmade works. The repetitive process of harvesting recycled paper, breaking it down, blending it with pigment, and then setting and solidifying the mixture reects the invocation of memory—and its inherent mutability.

As Minai created these works over the past year, revolutionary protests rang throughout her homeland of Iran. In particular, this phrase reverberated in the artist’s psyche:

“You may have burned our gardens but we still carry the seeds.”

This resilience, this steely determination to protect and harbor life, can also be found in the painted worlds of Madjeen Isaac, whose family migrated from Haiti to Brooklyn in 1995. Isaac’s scenes are a meditation on and celebration of Caribbean-American ancestry, attitude, and community through an astute observation of urban sprawl. The works indicate a desire to learn and a yearning to return.

Isaac’s layered compositions, which bustle with kineticism and burst with ora and fauna, invite questions: Could these images be reality, or do they hold the possibility of becoming so? What collective work and glorious sweat would it take to live in botanical abundance and harmony?

Like Isaac and Minai, Luján Pérez Hernández’s process is also a way to bridge connectedness and belonging between multiple places, as she melds printmaking, painting, and sculpture. Pérez grew up in constant ux between Madrid, Spain and several cities in the USA. An avid gardener, she describes the process of nding herself through the act of cultivation as a meditation on being “uprooted, potted, repotted, willing to be re-uprooted, and constantly adapting to your surroundings.” This perpetual movement led to Pérez’s empathetic nature as well as her understanding of the inevitably of life and loss.

The works gathered for this exhibition together indicate the resilience of a weathered garden full of promise. By using resources of remembered/recollected elements, we become the ever-lasting architects of our futures. May our memory gardens nurture the seeds of collective memory to thrive for generations.

Luján Pérez Hernandez (b. 1991, Madrid, ES) has lived in between Spain and the United States since the age of six. Following the completion of her bachelor’s degree, Perez worked and lived on farmland in Tupelo, Mississippi, creating her own printing press, later attending the Leipzig International Artist Program, and most recently the recipient of the Chubb Fellowship, and The Macedonia

Institute Residency in July 2021 Her work employs a combination of printmaking, drawing, painting, and sculpture; exploring the relationship between earth and spirit while tackling the eternally plaguing questions of love, death, rebirth, and belonging. Peréz presented a solo booth at Spring Break Art Fair 2021, was included in the New York Times reviewed Future Fairs booth in 2021. In 2022, she held a solo exhibition at Kapp Kapp gallery, and was featured in the group shows, “The Cowboys Made Me Cry” at Swivel Saugerties, NY, and “Sele” at Galerie MPA in Madrid, Spain.

Madjeen Isaac (b. 1996, Brooklyn, NY) has rooted her practice in reconstructing and assembling mélanges of urban and tropical environments to create utopias and realms of her imagination. Growing up in a predominantly Caribbean neighborhood and being a rst generation American inuences Isaac’s process of commemorating community, memories, and cultures that have shaped her upbringing. Isaac calls for environmental justice and food equity by centering narratives of Black and Caribbean folks leaning into their ancestral practice of agriculture and tending to the spaces they occupy in order to receive an abundance of joy, liberation and leisure. Isaac invites the viewer as both an outsider looking in and possibly existing in her worlds without the constraints of reality.

Isaac received a BFA in Fine Art from The Fashion Institute of Technology (2018) and an MA in Art+Edu & Community Practice at New York University (2021).

Aryana Minai (b. 1994, Los Angeles, CA) makes paper-based sculptures and wall works that are intimately linked to philosophies and histories of architecture, migration, labor, the body, and the handmade. Minai identies paper as a material that connects storytelling, cultural tradition, and craft, centering her practice on the diasporic subject's daily lived experiences and drawing from her personal archive of decontextualized Iranian-American content. Minai received her BFA from Art Center College of Design in 2016 and her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2020. Minai’s work has been exhibited at venues including the Craft Contemporary, OCHI, and Steve Turner in Los Angeles, CA; Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale, CA; Interloc in Rockport, ME; and Galerie Perrotin and Ed. Varie in New York, NY. Her work has been featured in publications including ArtNet ews, LA Weekly, Whitehot Magazine, and Arte East.

ABOUT THE CURATOR:

Sadaf Padder is a Brooklyn-based South-Asian-American independent curator, writer, and community organizer. She is the founder of Alpha Arts Alliance, a hyperlocal multidisciplinary collective and creative coaching service that pledges a percentage of all proceeds to youth arts initiatives.

Padder has curated throughout the country including 12 Gates Arts in Philadelphia, Glass Rice in San Francisco, NYAMA Fine art in Chelsea and Knowhere Art in Martha’s Vineyard. Her critical writing and curation centers underrepresented art histories and contemporary movements - particularly from the South Asian and Caribbean diasporas. She focuses on themes of neo-mythology, ecology and social justice.

Her curations have earned mentions in LA Weekly, Hyperallergic and ArtNews and resulted in acquisitions of BIPOC women artists by the Baltimore Museum of Art, Northwestern University and the Nion McEvoy Foundation. She is a Create Change Alumna with the Laundromat Project and a 2022-23 Emily J. Hall Tremaine Curatorial Fellow via Hyperallergic. You can nd her writing on ARTSY and Hyperallergic.