Jack Shainman Gallery has announced its representation of conceptual artist Charisse Pearlina Weston in collaboration with Patron Gallery. Based in Brooklyn, Weston works across sculpture, writing, installation, and photography. Utilizing techniques such as concealment, repetition, and enfoldment, her work posits Black interior life as a central site of Black resistance.
Weston often integrates glass into her work due to its inherent nature. Whether it be through photographs, fragments incorporated into a canvas, or an element within a sculpture, the duality of the material speaks to Weston’s understanding of Black resistance. Both fragile and susceptible to shatter at the hand of an act of violence, glass is also highly malleable despite that risk. Etched and embedded into the surface of her works are poetic fragments, as well as historical and autobiographical images. These intimate moments are often concealed and ensnared through intentional folds, offering a layer of protection and privacy to the object on display.
Weston (b. 1988, Houston, TX; based in Brooklyn, NY) is a conceptual artist who works across sculpture, writing, installation, and photography. Utilizing techniques such as concealment, repetition, and enfoldment, her work posits Black interior life as a central site of Black resistance.
Weston was a 2022 – 2023 Studio Museum Artist in Residence. A presentation of her work is included in And ever an edge: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2022–23 at MoMA PS1 through April 8th. She will also be included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial opening to the public on March 20th.
The artist writes, “Central to the artistic methodology is the reuse and re-articulation of materials.” From photographs of past installations or fragments of discarded glass, Weston formulates “yet another representation of meaning’s capacity of shatter.” “These reoccurrences develop into new forms that represent the ways in which repetition is both a symbol of black cultural production and its reliance on an order of temporal engagement in which the second time encodes an emergent originality.”
For gallery founder Jack Shainman, “I have been aware of Charisse’s work for some time now and have been consistently impressed by the innovation and depth to her practice. There is always a lot to consider when you deliberate working with a new artist, and for me the foremost factors are if it is work that I believe in, and if the artist has their own distinct means of approaching their subject matter. Right from the beginning it was clear that Charisse more than excelled in these spheres. Her manipulation of materials alone is so strikingly idiosyncratic, and when you further delve into the thought processes behind these methodologies you cannot help but be absolutely spellbound. I could not be more excited to be working together, and to see how her practice continues to grow and evolve.”
Weston shares, “I am extremely honored to join Jack Shainman Gallery and be amongst a roster of artists whose work actively puts pressure on systems of oppression and erasure. Furthermore, I have been deeply inspired by a number of these same artists as I’ve developed my practice, so it is truly incredible to share space with them now.
I am invested in exploring the generative possibilities housed within the intimate poetics of Black interior life; for me this is a space of agency wherein the modes and instances of (il)legibility are chosen instead of imposed. My artistic endeavors are concerned, foremost, with understanding, and then implementing, enfoldment, repetition, and concealment, methods which I term ‘Black tactics of refusal,’ as strategies for conjuring a spatial and temporal otherwise which counters and dismantles the ongoing threat of anti-Blackness. Ultimately my work is imagining what worlds are possible if our present symbolic order is flipped on itself; what new movements and sightlines could arise if the valve of our systems of meaning, the fuel of our present infrastructures of exploitation, is shut off or, better yet, obliterated? These are the possibilities I’m pursuing through my work.”
