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Charisse Pearlina 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 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.
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 to shatter.” For the artist, “these recurrences 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.”
