Charisse Pearlina Weston

New York-based artist Charisse Pearlina Weston’s solo exhibition engages with themes of surveillance and tactics of Black refusal by transforming materials associated with observation and control through repetition and reuse.

Weston's exhibition features new glass, lead, and concrete sculptures and works on canvas that challenge fixed narratives and systems of control. The core of this disruption lies in the manipulation of Mirropane, a reflective and transparent glass often used for monitoring. Weston's alteration of the glass’ reflective surface through kiln-firing and folding disrupts its surveillant function, rendering the surface opaque, cracking the reflective skin, and obscuring her etched text — thus resisting interpretation. This material transformation symbolically subverts the mechanisms of surveillance, questioning who holds power in the act of observing and being observed.

In addition to the stand-alone sculptures, the exhibition’s works on canvas employ Cubist fragmentation and abstraction, incorporating dismantled materials such as glass and frit fused with epoxy and oil stick. They disrupt through formal strategies of breaking apart and reassembling forms and disparate materials, offering multiple, simultaneous viewpoints and functions resisting the singular lens or comprehensive visibility. This strategy underscores the ways in which surveillance reinforces systemic violence by dictating visibility, access, and control. By distorting the boundaries between creation and collapse, Weston’s works metaphorically challenge the structures and ideologies that perpetuate oppression, highlighting Black interiority as a site of resistance and refusal.

Through these materials and methods, Weston blurs lines between visibility and invisibility, observer and observed, offering a layered critique of surveillance as both a material and ideological construct.

Biography

Charisse Pearlina Weston (b. 1988, Houston, Texas; based in Brooklyn, New York) is a conceptual artist who works across sculpture, writing, installation, and photography. Her work utilizes techniques such as concealment, repetition, and enfoldment and posits Black interior life as a central site of Black resistance. 

Weston holds a bachelor of arts from the University of North Texas, a master of science in modern art: history curating and criticism from the University of Edinburgh’s Edinburgh College of Art, and a master of fine arts in studio art from the University of California-Irvine. She is an alumna of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. 

Weston was awarded a Creative Capital Award in 2024, was an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and was named a 2023 Jerome Hill Fellow and a 2023-24 Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. She was also awarded the Burke Prize by the Museum of Art and Design in 2021. Recent solo exhibitions include the Project Row Houses and the Moody Center of the Arts at Rice University (Houston), as well as the Queens Museum (New York).

Header Image
Charisse Pearlina Weston
are there other pits deeper down?, 2024
Hahnemühle canvas etched with glass, frit, oil stick, silicone carbide, and epoxy
50 x 78 x 6 inches
© Charisse Pearlina Weston
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Patron Gallery, Chicago

Image Gallery
First row, from left:
Charisse Pearlina Weston; hallucinatory field (one), 2024; slumped and fused Mirropane and Solax glass panels etched with text, cast concrete, lead, epoxy, and frit; 53 1/2 x 37 x 20 inches; © Charisse Pearlina Weston; image by Joseph Krauss; courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Patron Gallery, Chicago

Charisse Pearlina Weston; at the same velocity, the same altitude, 2024; slumped Mirropane panels, laminated glass panel, and casted concrete; 60 x 24 x 10 1/2 inches; © Charisse Pearlina Weston; image by Joseph Krauss; courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Patron Gallery, Chicago

Charisse Pearlina Weston; there the end wheels and i am half convinced i am not dead, 2024; slumped Mirropane panels, laminated glass panel, lead, and casted concrete; 60 x 24 x 10 inches; © Charisse Pearlina Weston; image by Joseph Krauss; courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Patron Gallery, Chicago

Charisse Pearlina Weston; pyrolytic envelop I (into the bright and distributed subject side), 2024; text etched on slumped and folded Mirropane surveillance glass and concrete; 51 1/2 x 22 x 14 1/2 inches; © Charisse Pearlina Weston; courtesy of the artist and Dr. Charles Boyd

Second row, from left:
Charisse Pearlina Weston; are there other pits deeper down?, 2024; Hahnemühle canvas etched with glass, frit, oil stick, silicone carbide, and epoxy; 50 x 78 x 6 inches; © Charisse Pearlina Weston; courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Patron Gallery, Chicago

Charisse Pearlina Weston; deeper down, 2024; Hahnemühle canvas etched with glass, frit, oil stick, and gel medium; 34 x 26 1/8 x 2 1/2 inches; © Charisse Pearlina Weston; courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Patron Gallery, Chicago

Charisse Pearlina Weston; through empty air, the barrier, 2024; Hahnemühle canvas etched with glass, frit, oil stick, and epoxy; 79 1/2 x 49 7/16 x 3 inches; © Charisse Pearlina Weston; courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Patron Gallery, Chicago

Charisse Pearlina Weston; to the other places set aside for us, 2024; Hahnemühle canvas etched with glass, frit, oil stick, and gel medium; 65 1/2 x 49 1/2 x 3 inches; © Charisse Pearlina Weston; courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Patron Gallery, Chicago