With a teal roof and gabled windows, a colonial-style dollhouse is at the center of Isaiah Lee’s practice. In his current body of work, the Chicago artist renders childhood toys that transition from objects of play and nostalgia into uncanny, animate entities. Set in the scaled-down rooms and landscape around the miniature home, Lee’s scenes channel the wonder and theatrics of the adolescent imagination, while confronting the ways these early experiences permeate one’s life.
Born into a fundamentalist Christian family in Missouri, the artist grapples with the contradictions within the teachings of his upbringing, alongside the lived reality of being a Black man in the U.S. In “Shepherd I,” a tiny green astronaut evokes Moses as he leads livestock through the house, while an enormous skull and concealed man loom in the shadows. The vast differences in scale within a single scene gesture toward the outsized impact of some encounters and how our memories have the capability of exaggerating the scope.
Narrative ripples throughout Lee’s paintings, with “Romeo and Juliet” and “Juliet” capturing two different points of view of the same scene. The artist’s ability to shift perspectives is a compelling world-building technique and, like his heavy use of shadow, positions each composition as an illuminated nook amid a vast network of the unknown. “They arrive at a moment when it feels necessary to return to childhood as a way of uncovering who we are and what good we are still capable of bringing forth,” he adds.
Darkness pervades many of the pieces, not necessarily in a sinister way but instead to suggest the omnipresence of the unknown and a sense of underlying fear. He writes that “faith cannot simply be abandoned but must be understood as an inheritance wrought into the body and the imagination.”
Lee is preparing for a solo exhibition this fall at crosswalk in Chicago. Titled A Thief in the Night, the show nods to the Biblical notion that people need to repent in order to be “right with the Lord.” “For many, this warning creates a persistent sense of unease, fostering the belief that no amount of faithfulness is truly enough,” the artist says. “Life becomes a race against time, a race that cannot be won.”
If you’re in Chicago, you can see some of Lee’s works through November 1 in an exhibition celebrating the city’s emerging artists at Hyde Park Art Center, and A Thief in the Night opens on October 16. Find more on Instagram.
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