4.8.24 — The Chill Winds of Home
A chill wind blows through the art of Charisse Pearlina Weston, but a powerful one. All three of this year’s artists in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem feel the chill in their own lives, and all three look for shelter from the storm.
Jeffrey Meris goes so far as to include body casts of himself and his mother, because attachments matter, and so does the search for identity. Devin N. Morris paints an ordinary black kid on an ordinary city street, mounted above a chest of drawers. 
He even mounts a door right on the wall. Welcome home.
For all that, they know displacement, even as their art has found a home, through April 8. For the fifth year, MoMA PS1 wraps up the residency with an exhibition while the Studio Museum is closed for expansion and renovation. Meris was born that much further away, in Haiti, but he is not, so far, looking back. He adds warmth and color to his paintings with magazine clips that look suitably commercial and American. Never mind that they include photos of red blood cells, already ominous enough. They must be so for him, who has a compromised immune system.
Lest you doubt it, he needs crutches to walk, and a sphere of crutches pointing out hangs from the ceiling at the center of the room, like a Death Star. He also paints with cuts into roofing materials, which themselves provide shelter while exposed to the elements. Those two body casts, both busts, fall well short of motherly love. They look badly damaged in their unpalatable white resin. Come to think of it, Morris hangs his door too high on a wall to offer access, and it leads nowhere. Another landscape seems about to be swamped by a tidal wave, and enormous eyes look out a window to spy on you.
It is all the give and take of survival and hope. Morris bathes his scenes in sunlight, and his assemblage moves easily from the city into nature. He paints young people beside a tree and on the grass, resting or reading, like his version of Luncheon on the Grass without the nudity and provocation. He also adapts the materials of home to nature. A chair leg becomes a branch, and scraps of paper become the trees of a young forest, where junk like key chains scatters color on the ground. More paper twigs serve as a shawl or the cape of a superhero.
Charisse Pearlina Weston sticks to abstraction where, so long after Minimalism, you can expect a chill. Paintings stick to black and white or to white and a pale, icy green. The colors move across the image like sudden blasts, and she incorporates texturing so that the blasts seem to have shattered. Sculpture runs to heavier but still vulnerable materials. Glass breaks off awkwardly, etched with impenetrable text, and rolled lead might have curled up a moment before. The glass and steel give weight to and threaten one another.
Could they also take the shape of windows? One can make out curtains, peeling back but without a view inside. Weston cites a public program that sought to relieve the decay of the South Bronx and Harlem—but not by doing more to keep housing functional or to provide amenities. How about a few more windows with nicer curtains and potted plants? I cannot take “And Ever an Edge” as this year’s exhibition title and its poetic diction all that seriously, but all three artists do have an edge. They will just have to call it the edge of home.
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