(Riot) Through: The Fold, The Shatter traces, on the one hand, the history of the contemporary architectural deployments of glass as a material invocation of freedom, intimacy and as a site of power; and on the other, the symbolic and material use of glass in the surveillance and policing of Black people through tactics developed from the “Broken Window Theory.” Through a series of new, folded glass sculptures mounted on custom, concrete architectural forms, this project will also consider how strategic references and representations of broken windows in media coverage of past and recent protests against the anti-Black violence of police continue to perpetuate racialized surveillance and oppression. It will also look to recent riots in defense of white supremacy as reinforcement of this subversive deployment of the symbolic. This work asks what it means to be compressed from the tension of the racializing practices of the social inside—a tension that transforms sight/seeing/being seen and protocols of movement—and how this tension reverberates on Black bodies in the face of anti-blackness violence?

Charisse Pearlina Weston is a Brooklyn-based conceptual artist and writer whose practice emerges from deep material investigations of the symbolic and literal folds, layerings, and collapses of space, poetics, and the autobiographical. Interweaving glass sculpture, sound, video, and photography with poetic fragments of black experience in the form of text, her work explores the interstices of black interiors and intimacies. Her recent and forthcoming exhibitions include group shows at the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston and Art Space San Antonio, as well as solo presentations at Project Row Houses, Abrons Art Center, Recess, and the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University. She has received awards from Artadia Fund For the Arts, the Dallas Museum of Art’s Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund, Puffin Foundation, Santos Foundation, among others. In 2019 she was a Dedalus Foundation Fellow in Painting and Sculpture and a nominee for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. She is currently an Artist Fellow at the Museum of Art and Design. She holds a master’s of fine arts from the University of California-Irvine. She also participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2019.