Curatorial Essay

Memory Garden, a group exhibition at Swivel Gallery featuring Aryana Minai, Madjeen Isaac, and Luján Pérez Hernández, curated by Sadaf Padder.

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.

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 reflects the invocation of memory—and its inherent mutability."

The skeletal leaf nestled in the nuclei of Life Forms I (2023) and Life Forms II (2023) functions as an altar, preserving particles of previous works and objects Minai has collected over the years. The leaf nests are pregnant with life potential and serve as an analogy for transnational identities that exist within one another and balance past, present and future.

The tactile nature of the work renders visible the emotive impressions of the art-making. Finger indentations can be seen on the surface of the paper, alluding to the material’s ability to hold and receive Minai’s touch, cementing her existence. This process echoes the practices of brickmakers, who carve their initials in the clay before drying and stacking it to build a structure. Thus, she forges a connection between the philosophies of migration, labor, and the body, such as how migrant bodies contribute to growth and development in their countries of origin and destination. Minai also includes bas reliefs imprinted by old discarded woodblocks sent to her by a childhood friend in Iran, which include patterns similar to those found in Iranian architecture, often incorporating elements of nature, such as gardens, fountains, and courtyards.

Edwin Arzeta, artist and writer, captures the effect of Minai's work. "The familiarity of stacked bricks, arches, flowers, leaves, altars, doors, ironworks, gives us entry, and once within we have the freedom to dwell. It is in the marrow of a place that inorganic matter can suddenly be as alive as the memory of its inhabitants." Memory can be painful, messy, and imperfect, but its sourcing and recall are imperative to the preservation of collective histories and the cultivation of new worlds.

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.

In a departure from earlier works, which juxtaposed scenes of Brooklyn and Haiti in magical realist settings, Isaac seamlessly integrates the two locales, mingling brownstones and native plants along a shared plane. Isaac’s layered compositions, which bustle with kineticism and burst with flora 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?

The Creole pig, indigenous to Hispaniola, appears in Herd the Piggy Banks (Nou Fout Bouke!), a nod to the fortitude of farmers who hid this native species and kept it safe during the 1978 government-mandated extermination campaign in Haiti. This edict was issued to “protect” the North American hog industry from African Swine Flu, which was harmless to humans but could kill hogs. The slaughter adversely affected the livelihood of agricultural workers throughout the country and led to a drastic decline in school enrollment in following years.

Ties That Bind Us Before We Dip depicts a family excursion to Saut d'Eau waterfall, the tallest in Haiti, and the site of a yearly pilgrimage and healing ritual that honors the vodou god, or lwa, of love and healing, Erzulie Dantor. Meanwhile, Foraging During Golden Hour, shows two neighborhood women foraging for seman kontra, commonly known as wormseed, to use in medicinal tonic. The gaze of Isaac’s characters varies, either establishing direct rapport with the viewer or getting lost in their own worlds, bound up in moments of intimacy, activity, or reflection that are left open to interpretation. In the face of suppression, silencing, eradication, ailments, Isaac fans embers of memory, passed through the anecdotes and lived experiences of her kin.

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 flux between Madrid, Spain and several cities in the USA. An avid gardener, she describes the process of finding 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.

In Pérez’s latest body of multi-dimensional work, When These Vessels Felt Like Giants, she depicts scenes of resilience, harvesting, and ecstasy—each corresponding to a related tincture.1 The artist emulates Spanish ceramic vessels such as the botijo, used for carrying water, and the albarello, a vessel used to store medicines. The size of the work is meant to envelop the viewer as if in an amniotic embrace. “Growing” from each vessel are woodcuts of various plants the artist has cultivated, snipped, killed, and propagated over the last two years—and which also compose the tinctures each work references. In the back of each vessel is a carved channel that holds a vial filled with an essential element from the tinctures—similar to the germinating leaf-nests held in the center of Minai’s portals.

For example, The Flower You Hold In Your Hands Was Born Today, And Already It As Old As You Are, shows figures harvesting nettle, chickweed and dandelion, used in a tincture for physical energy. The plants, in turn, encircle the scene. In a particularly sensitive work, You Can Never Go Home, Only Go Home Again, Pérez amplifies the strength of her sister-friend who underwent chemotherapy last year. The portrait, inspired by painter Francis Picabia, is surrounded by the leaves of the red maple, the subject’s childhood favorite, and engulfed in boughs of white willow, caraway, and astragalus. Her gaze evokes self-awareness, strength, and acknowledgement of trial and tribulation—while continuing to love, and love fiercely, through it all.

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.