I spend a lot of time walking through New York and often find myself in front of condo construction sites, gawking at high-end living exemplified by floor-to-ceiling expanses of glass. Paradoxes of display and privacy, from inside, these oversize windows would seem to promise the whole city (or at least everything in frame) as within the owner’s grasp; from outside, they take on the character of sentries, deflecting and intimidating. The afternoon I visited Charisse Pearlina Weston’s Harlem studio, I thought about windows, as I puzzled through her subtle, varied interactions with glass. Recently kiln-fired pieces were laid out on foam on the floor. The color of ocean water at night, they looked almost like protective gear or exquisitely rucked armor. An indentation at the top of one suggested the impression of a knee. A protrusion at the top of another resembled the bridge of a nose or a melting mask. All around, abstract wall works in progress evoked something between sidewalk topographies, forensic photography, and surreal dreamscapes. To create these works, Weston prints photographs of glass onto canvas, then attaches layers of actual glass, using shards to scratch or cut into the surfaces. In her work, glass (like a window) delineates thresholds between interior and exterior, defines social limits, and constitutes contradictions—permission or confinement, mystery or revelation.
A Jerome Foundation fellow, as well as a fellow at Princeton, the Houston-born, Brooklyn-based artist contributed a monumental piece to the 2024 Whitney Biennial. That work, un- (anterior ellipse[s] as mangled container; or where edges meet to wedge and [un] moor) (2024), consists of six perfectly aligned rectangles of dark glass hung from the ceiling at a dramatic angle. A study in suspense or a fantasy of levitation, it calls to mind great movie scenes in which a space-age battleship lands, puts down its flaps, and lets out a hiss before troopers emerge. Or is it more like a window destined for one of those luxury residential towers, halted on the way up, its future undecided? Standing underneath, I could sense its weight. . .
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