Sedrick Chisom
Region: Northeast
My paintings use the romantic landscape as a site where the
apocalyptic narratives of white supremacy, Christianity, and
climate change intersect—a scenario in which most of the built
environment has been obliterated and transformed into a toxic,
hallucinatory wasteland. I am concerned with the historical
construction of whiteness in fiction as an antagonism between
notions of civility and barbarism, the built environment versus
the “natural” landscape—the civic human subject in relation to
the monstrous absolute Other. I position the romantic landscape
as disturbed by the traces of Western imperialism and structural
violence through a process that involves layering, spraying,
or scraping away. For me, painting is a process of agitating a
sealed-away past as a means to reconstitute itself in the present.
I reference contemporary Black Lives Matter imagery, medieval
Christian iconography, figures from Western mythology/history,
as well as details from my own idiosyncratic life story.