Charisse Pearlina Weston: again that certain dark who risks being the forever nocturnal source of light itself

PATRON is proud to present, again that certain dark who risks being the forever nocturnal source of light itself, a solo-exhibition by New York-based artist Charisse Pearlina Weston. This exhibition marks her first in Chicago and with the gallery since the announcement of her representation in the fall of 2023. 

This exhibition brings together new glass sculptures, installations, and works on canvas exploring iteration, risk, temporality and collapse as tactics of Black refusal. The works in this exhibition feature the artist’s latest experimentations with repetition, conveyed through the reuse of materials: structural components of dismantled or collapsed spatial interventions reappear as tools of inscription, collage material, photographic ground or malleable suture. As a result, this iterative series collapses the established temporal boundaries of the art object and its process of creation. The complex interconnectedness of these works also serves as a disruptive metaphor for the ideological systems which undergird our social realm and reinforce systemic violence. 

Also included in this exhibition are a new series of sculptures in which Weston, through fusing and slumping, inverts the material qualities of Mirropane, a surveillance glass made by the London-based glass manufacturer Pilkington. Once kiln-fired and manipulated, the once silvered, reflective surface of the panes crack and become opaque, allowing Weston’s text, etched into its surface, to evade legibility. This series deepens Weston’s exploration of the intersections of the material and ideological technologies of surveillance, Black interior life, and resistance through a literal blurring of the line between who is surveilled and who surveils, positionalities otherwise determined by light, surface, reflection and transparency.

Taken together, the works in this exhibition arise from a fault plane, an afterward, an entropy, and threaten what it means to come again.