May Cause Side Effects

Solo Show

October- December 15th

There are few acts more radical than a man of Caribbean descent making himself visible in a
state of deliberate vulnerability. Christopher Ender Coryat, a Black Trinidadian and Jamaican artist, refuses the frame institutions impose on Black artists. He offers fragility as philosophy.

In May Cause Side Effects, Coryat pulverizes prescription medications (psychotropics, anti-
seizures, mood stabilizers) then binds them into pigment. These materials moved through his
body before arriving on the surface. To paint with them is to build epistemology through
erosion. The paintings may crack, lift, or decay. That is the point. Coryat's work rejects
stability as a moral good. It metabolizes failure and resists the demand to endure. These
works shimmer where they shouldn't: iridescent flashes against bruised tones, pitted
surfaces, gashes. There is beauty here, but it is frictional, like oil on asphalt, gleaming and
warning.

In July 2025, I walked through the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The history of slavery is told through the oppressor's documentation. In 2025, we are still shown our bodies through someone else's hand. Coryat breaks this. His paintings do not
perform survival or polish vulnerability for academic framing. They are what gets made when the archive fails, and you still insist on being seen.

Sometimes he appears as a Black woman, a white woman, something in between. These
shifts may be theology, a survival device, or a seizure. Every figure is still him. Every
transformation is authorship. This is not catharsis. It is reclamation and what remains after silence.

-Allicette Torres