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 and writer who works across sculpture, writing, installation, and photography. Utilizing techniques such as concealment, repetition, and enfoldment, Weston’s work posits Black interior life as a central site of Black resistance.

Born in Houston, 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 8, 2025. She will also be included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, opening to the public on March 20, 2025.

Weston received a bachelor’s degree 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, with critical theory emphasis, from the University of California-Irvine in 2019. She is an alumna of Whitney Museum of American Art’s independent study program. She was named a 2023 Jerome Hill Fellow, as well as a 2023 Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University for the 2023-2024 academic year. Recent solo exhibitions include the Queens Museum (New York) and the Moody Center of the Arts at Rice University (Houston).

Header Image
pyrolytic envelop I (into the bright and distributed subject side), 2024 (detail)
Text etched on slumped and folded Mirropane surveillance glass and concrete
51 ½ x 22 x 14 ½ inches
Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and private collection