Sedrick Chisom
Bloomington, IN/ New York, NY
November 2 - December 7, 2020
ARTIST STATEMENT
“Year XX10, the final year of the Christian era. Twenty years after People of Color gave up on wypipo and left the planet to explore the cosmos, the enigmatic genetic disease revitiligo expresses itself amongst every yt on earth, imperiling whiteness. With no known cure, the remaining terrestrial nations of North America face unprecedented national turmoil as wypipo begin to develop dark skin pigmentation. President Maura Gardener of the Coastal Union of Civic States and President Ronald Tiller of the Confederate Disaffiliation of States concurrently declare a state of emergency for the countries they lead. A combined forces military operation between the Confederate Disaffiliation of States and the Coastal Union of Civic States is launched to search for Aryanness in Other Places. Scouts from both the CD of S and the CU of CS conduct a joint expedition in the polar ice caps of Monument Valley, where reports of monstrous people being sighted in the savage south have emerged...”
From this narrative premise, I situate an interdisciplinary engagement between painting and writing (I wrote a 10,000 word three act play concerning the same narrative). Together both mediums interact in my practice as strategies for world building. I merge a mode of painting characterized by toxic pigment, hallucinatory imagery and layered active surfaces, with Scifi and Romantic Landscape tropes to envision a world that haunts our contemporary imagination of the future. A world ruined by climate apocalypse, nuclear fall out, disease epidemic and white nationalist ghosts.
I use paint for its suggestive dreamlike material properties; the tendencies for spaces to emerge from consecutive glazes, drips, stains, sprays, and scrapes. I conjure imagery from this process to portray a cautionary tale or a ghost story. A world that is simultaneously familiar, with recognizable markers of time and place, but estranged from our own through alien reimagination. What takes place is a polemic anti-eulogy of white “heroic” frontiersman. These explorers are cast in my work as agents of the rebirth of the Confederacy but mutated by mysterious disease and left twisted and emaciated. A character in its own right, Monument Valley functions in my narrative as an unpromising and refusing site, at odds with the covenant of manifest destiny. Instead of a colonial encounter with sublime wilderness, Monument Valley becomes resituated for my characters to journey into hell.
There are deliberately very few black bodies involved in this narrative. Instead I use elaborate descriptive titles that channel a certain black voice. As a black man, I want for the abiding severance between representations of blackness and representations of racism and for the direct subject of racism to point to white people. Therefore in my narratives, the consequences of racism inevitably enact upon white bodies.
I reference contemporary Black Lives Matter imagery and images pulled from depictions of journeys into hell such as The Inferno, Deliverance, Apocalypse Now and the paintings of Theodore Gericault, The Hudson River and Rocky Mountain Schools of painting, medieval Christian iconography, figures from western mythology/history, details from my own idiosyncratic life story, and lyrics by Nina Simone.
BIO
Sedrick Chisom (b. 1989, Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in Bloomington, IN and New York, NY. The artist received a full scholarship to study at Cooper Union and at Rutgers University. While at Cooper Union, Chisom received the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation Award for Exceptional Ability. After completing his BFA, he received his MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Recent solo shows include "Westward Shrinking Hours” at Pilar Corrias in London and “When the Night Air Stirs” at Matthew Brown LA in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited at JTT Gallery, the ICA in Richmond Virginia, Signal Gallery, and Abrons Art Center. He has been featured in New American Painters (Issue 134), Forbes Magazine, Artnet, and Artsy. He was recently awarded The 2018-2019 VCU Fountainhead Fellowship in Painting and Drawing and was in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
ARTIST LINKS
Pilar Corrias
https://www.pilarcorrias.com/exhibitions/condo-2020-sofia-mitsola-sedrick-chisom/
Matthew Brown
https://www.matthewbrowngallery.com/exhibitions/sedrick-chisom2
Matthew Brown
https://www.matthewbrowngallery.com/exhibitions/sedrick-chisom
https://www.instagram.com/sedrickchisom/