Sedrick Chisom

Sedrick Chisom (b. 1989, Philadelphia, PA)

At the centre of Sedrick Chisom’s practice is a commitment to confounding racial origin myths and pseudosciences toward creating apocalyptic fantasies in writing and painting. Appropriating imagery from Black Lives Matter demonstrations, medieval Christian iconography, and Greek mythology, Chisom questions who has the power to construct natural and social worlds, upending the authority of those worlds in the process. Chisom appoints himself a new mythmaker, one whose motivation is fundamentally pro-Black and who is committed to the acceleration of new imaginative possibilities.

Chisom’s paintings are informed by and in dialogue with the speculative narratives he generates out of his extensive research practice. One subject of his narratives is the departure of the POC Federation Fleet, after which all people of colour have been transported away from Earth, leaving behind a series of landlocked commonwealths inhabited by white people with a medical condition that has altered the pigment of their skin. In his paintings, sickly violets, bright greens, and iridescent whites evoke the strange toxins of his narratives. In Chisom’s segregation narratives, the division of humans by supposed race is re-imagined, and the tropes of the American Civil War and other historic conflicts are revised. The remaining white race is divided into military opposition forces characterised respectively as the Confederate Disaffiliation of States and the Coastal Union of Civic States, both of which strive to re-assert their whiteness in a world where only white people remain.

Text by Amber Esseiva.

Sedrick Chisom lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include: The Villain of History for One Night Alone, Pilar Corrias, London (2024); …And 108 Prayers of Evil, CLEARING, New York (2024); Angels to Some, Demons to Others (with Katherine Bradford), Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2022); Twenty Thousand Years of Fire and Snow, Pilar Corrias, London (2021); Westward Shrinking Hours, Condo London in collaboration with Pilar Corrias (2020) and When the Night Air Stirs, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2019). His work has been displayed in numerous group exhibitions including Door to the Atmosphere, Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2022); In the Black Fantastic, Hayward Gallery, London (2022) and Kunsthal Rotterdam (2022-2023); Possédées, MO.CO. Montpellier (2020), and Great Force, curated by Amber Esseiva at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Richmond (2020).