Sedrick Chisom’s American monsters

Contributed by Marcus Civin / The Philadelphia-born, New York-based painter Sedrick Chisom’s gothic, thematically inventive “…And 108 Prayers of Evil” at Clearing is his first solo show in New York. At the entrance to the gallery, a block of wall text sets the scene for Chisom’s mostly large-scale oil paintings and charcoal drawings. The action depicted occurs in the year 2210, when the Greek mythological figure Medusa is in trouble again. Almost comically, various political groups accuse her of listening to whispers in the forest and slipping gangsta rap lyrics to pious youth. A magmatic eruption threatens, and massacres have occurred in a place called Capital Citadel. Chisom explains that in this universe Revitiligo, a made-up reversal of the autoimmune disease vitiligo that causes patches of skin to lose color, here makes white people darker.

Chisom is a talented painter. His carefully organized spaces recall Japanese screens, stately early American photographs, and American landscape painting from the same period. But here the bucolic scenes of Frederic Church and Thomas Cole here have gone awry. He layers paint and lets it drip, nearly obscuring charcoal delineations of entryways, walls, trees, or mountains. In a 2023 YouTube video, he said that he craved “the adrenaline rush” of “pulling [a painting] together when it was falling apart at the seams.” But Chisom’s color relationships suggest diligent study of painters from Mark Rothko to Katherine Bradford, and his ability to evoke hidden fears and conjure brutal imagery calls to mind Munch and Goya.

Chisom’s world is fraught, icky, and yet engrossing. Noxious-looking lands seem to fester under thick, polluted skies. Everyone and everything is monstrous. In a museum case, Chisom includes John Friedman’s 1981 book The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, which catalogues Westerners’ longstanding demonization of non-Westerners, pictured as having dog-heads, eyes on their shoulders, or ears covering their entire bodies. Many of his characters are descendants of racist myth-makers. Spectrous Lee Retreated to Private Life to Spare The Citizens of The Capitol Citadel of His Domestic Horrors presents a figure with broad shoulders and a gray-green pallor who resembles Robert E. Lee, but with a pointy goblin ear. In other paintings, men wear Confederate uniforms and what look like Klan hoods, an arm and two heads are impaled on spikes, and a soldier and his dog have wrestled down a troll beneath leafless trees that seem to mimic the agonized twitches and jerks of the combatants.

Another source for Chisom is Nell Irvin Painter’s 2010 book The History of White People, which explains how tendentious pseudoscience had cast American whiteness as an incident of beauty, intelligence, and morality. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, for instance, the venerated American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested excluding Irish and German people from the category of the elevated human family on this basis. After they had served in large numbers in the Union army and new immigrants arrived on American shores, however, the Irish and the Germans were rated less inferior and more white.

The darkening of Chisom’s white characters cleverly counters this insidious dynamic. In The General of The Northern Armies Reportedly Roamed The Southern Cross Settlement After Accusing His Outside Agitator of Leading the Righteous Ones Astray, a ghoulish man wearing a Confederate slouch hat poses with his arm hooked around a thin tree. Leaves from that tree and others nearby are flying off. A hill behind the trees seems to be melting. Purple and red drips and yellow sprays destabilize the ground while the sky appears to be on fire or dangerously pulsing. The man could be preparing himself for a fiery demise or posing proudly in front of the hellscape he helped wreak. If he considers himself righteous, he is terrifying. If not, he is tragic.

“Sedrick Chisom: …And 108 Prayers of Evil,” Clearing, 260 Bowery, New York, NY. Through June 8, 2024.

About the author: Marcus Civin is based in Brooklyn and has written about art or interviewed artists for Afterimage, Artforum, Art in America, BOMB, Boston Art Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Camera Austria, DAMN, Full Bleed, Maake, Metal, Plus, Prospect Art, Sculpture, and StirWorld among other publications.