Sedrick Chisom

At the center 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 the POC Federation Fleet, after which all people of color 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 characterized 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. ...