(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 is grounded in a deep material investigation of poetics and the autobiographical to explore the delicate intimacies and reticent poetics underlying black life. Her work has been exhibited in group shows at Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, Bard College of Art (forthcoming) and solo presentations at Project Row Houses, Recess, as well as two forthcoming museum exhibitions (fall 2022). Her recent awards include grants from Artadia Fund For the Arts, the Dallas Museum of Art’s Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund, and the Harpo Foundation. In 2019 she was a Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellow in Painting and Sculpture. She is the recipient of the Museum of Art and Design (MAD)’s 2021 Burke Prize and was also a 2021 Artist Fellow at MAD. She holds a MFA from the University of California-Irvine and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program.