Sedrick Chisom
Kadist is happy to welcome Sedrick Chisom for a research residency from the 4th to the 18th of July. “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.” Text by Amber Esseiva, Assistant Curator, Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. Sedrick Chisom (b. 1989, Philadelphia, PA) received a full scholarship to study at Cooper Union. 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 exhibitions include Twenty Thousand Years of Fire and Snow , Pilar Corrias, London (2021); Westward Shrinking Hours , Condo London in collaboration with Pilar Corrias (2020); When the Night Air Stirs , Matthew Brown Los Angeles (2019); The Final Excursion Into the Savage South , Rutgers University (2019); and The Ghost of White Presidents Yet To Come , ADA Gallery (2019). His work has been displayed in numerous group exhibitions including Possédées , MO. CO. Montpellier (2020); Cult of the Crimson Queen , Ceysson & Bénétière, New York (2020); Great Force , curated by Amber Esseiva at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Richmond (2020); Beside Myself at JTT Gallery, New York (2018); GDPR at Signal Gallery, Brooklyn (2018); and Leap Century at Abrons Art Center, New York (2018). Chisom was awarded the 2018-2019 VCU Fountainhead Fellowship in Painting and Drawing and was a 2019 resident at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. *People of Color