Sedrick Chisom

In these new paintings of Sedrick Chisom’s, his figures are more grounded than before. Their bodies have more weight and volume, a more solid outline—but many other parts of this world are merging. Imagined sights, hallucinations, representations of representations, events that took place but have since been forgotten, strings of letters – many different versions and interpretations of reality are compounded together.

Sedrick’s studio chair appears in front of a bay, a scene of Virginia during the Civil War. Figures from different time periods share the same plane. We arrive in a speculative future in which several hundred years of American history keep on repeating and acting upon one another. The American Revolution, the Civil War, the Open Range times never ended. Time has been metabolized. Time does not move in any one direction. These are paintings of nonlinear time: all times looping, overlapping, happening simultaneously, just as they are now, in the present day.

Solidity and flow are pitched against each other: wet paint running like ocean spray versus the solid form of an ironclad. Multiple paintings collide. A stone wall is intruded upon by floating embers pulled in from another painting: the Capitol Citadel burning in liquid fire far away in Monument Valley. This canonical event, at the center of this ongoing epic, shifts the world. Cataclysm happens out of frame, offstage, like in the theater.

The land of the living crashes into the land of the dead. There is a figure laid flat on his back with his hat atop his coffin. He is dead. But is he going to the afterlife? Are those horsemen his comrades, enemies, maybe spirits he is joining? Perhaps he is among them already, looking down at his body from the vantagepoint of the setting sky.

In an interpretation of a detail from a 19th-century archival photograph, there are prisoners lined up in barrels. We don’t know what they are being punished for. The crime has been lost. One barrel-man is stuck with a piece of paper on which are printed four letters. They are a mystery. It is no longer possible – for the artist, for anyone consulting the original photograph or the painting – to know what the letters say. 

Real and imagined events and spaces are collapsing into one another. The world and the stage are pushed together. Two figures face each other on a stage, before a painted backdrop. The real and the mythological stand face to face in theatrical, directed light. One has a tail and pointy ears. Figures like these emerge from the old found images the artist scours, and from his imagination too. He does not know exactly who they are. They are revealing themselves to him and to us. The Devil comes down to meet you on a stage in America, in-between different shifting layers of reality. Is all of America a stage? Is all of history looping? 

Napoleon, the World Spirit, appears with some of his soldiers on the artist’s balcony at 2:00AM in London, after ten hours of painting while listening to podcasts on Hegel. The World Spirit Reappeared During Miasmic Ass-Crack Hours. French and American histories colliding in England again. Back in the painted mythology, the European powers are sponsoring Transatlantic companies. The mytho-historical space imagined by the artist, and the artist’s mythologizing of his own life, are beginning to blend together.

— Dean Kissick

Sedrick Chisom (b. 1989, Philadelphia) lives and works in London, UK. He received a full scholarship to study at Cooper Union, where he completed his BFA in 2016 and was awarded the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation Award for Exceptional Ability. In 2018, he received his MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

Solo and two-person 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, in collaboration with Pilar Corrias, London (2020); When the Night Air Stirs, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2019); The Final Excursion Into the Savage South, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (2019); The Ghost of White Presidents Yet To Come, ADA Gallery, Richmond, VA (2019); and You Just Gotta Look For It, Cooper Union, New York (2018).

In 2022, Chisom was included in In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery (2022), curated by Ekow Eshun.

Recent group exhibitions include PROGRAM, Matthew Brown, New York (2024); Manic Pixie Nightmare Drawings, Adler Beatty, New York (2024); the 14th floor, Gratin, New York (2024); Wave Pattern Part II, Max Werner, New Yor, (2023); Works on Paper: 100 Years, Amanita, New York (2023); UGLY PAINTING, curated by Dean Kissick and Eleanor Cayre, Nahmad Contemporary, New York (2023); Papertrail, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2023); In the Black Fantastic, Hayward Gallery, London (2022); Reference Material, curated by Brook Hsu, Adler Beatty, New York (2022); Supermoon, CLEARING, Beverly Hills, CA (2022); One hundred eighty-six billion steps to the sun, CLEARING, New York (2022); Dissolving Realms, curated by Kathy Hessel, Kasmin, New York (2022); Possédé·e·s, Montpellier Contemporain, France (2021); Great Force, curated by Amber Esseiva, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Richmond, VA (2020); Cult of the Crimson Queen, Ceysson & Bénétière, New York (2019); Beside Myself, JTT Gallery, New York (2018); GDPR, Signal Gallery, New York (2018); and Leap Century, Abrons Art Center, New York (2018).

Chisom was awarded the 2018–2019 VCU Fountainhead Fellowship in Painting and Drawing at the Macedonia Institute and was a 2019 resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

His work is included in the collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; Perez Art Museum Miami, Florida; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; The Hessel Collection, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; and Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China.