The world Sedrick Chisom creates in his paintings feels too shocking, awful and revolting to be real; but the work is a warning, a fictional, horrifying caution against the constant, looming threat of race war.
The world in the young American artist’s paintings is an America without Black people, a world ruled by white supremacy but where all the surviving white people have been infected with some vile, disfiguring virus. Where his work was once outwardly and obviously horrific – as seen in ‘In The Black Fantastic’ at the Hayward Gallery in 2022 – the evil here is subtler, more insidious.
Soldiers elsewhere sit on horseback or watch over battlefields in dress that is half-Civil War reenactment, half-contemporary alt right fash fashion, his vision of Mount Rushmore reimagines the fathers of his nation as gloopy demonic presences. A boy and his dog murder a bog troll, an olde worlde general stands proudly before a huge tank. Whiteness is a dominant force, but the fight isn’t over.
Good sci fi isn’t actually about spaceships and aliens, it just uses spaceships and aliens as a way of speaking about the real world, about actual life. It’s metaphorical, allegorical. Which is what Chisom’s alternate history is too: its aim is to lay bare an uncomfortable truth the artist sees all around him; that the far right, the alt right, the white supremacists are all winning.
I don’t think these are his best, most direct paintings, and maybe they’re a little hamstrung by their washed out, knowing Doig-isms.
But the work succeeds on its ideas, its feelings, more than its execution. Chisom’s horror is uncanny, so near the truth that it edges you into discomfort more than disgust, because all this unease is perilously real.