Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Floor 5

Born 1988 in Houston, TX
Lives in New York, NY

In this installation, Charisse Pearlina Weston has wedged large panes of smoked glass against the Museum’s walls to suggest a moment of pause before collapse, suspension, and heightened risk. A poet as well as a visual artist, Weston draws on the Blues tradition of using repetition to create or amplify meaning. Here, that takes the form of reuse, as Weston repurposes glass she used in an exhibition at the Queens Museum in 2022. There, the installation of the glass was deliberately obstructive, evoking the “stall-in” planned by the Brooklyn and Bronx branches of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to protest the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair. Though never executed, it would have staged a monumental traffic jam on the roads leading to Flushing Meadows– Corona Park. Through this repetition, Weston explores what she calls “tactics of Black refusal” in deliberate contrast to the usual connotations of glass with transparency and access. She also plays with the idea of a work of art that may never be totally resolved, but instead evolves to create new meanings and evade structures of ownership.