JESSICA JANE CHARLESTON

Charleston’s work focuses on the female form, and the many facets of one’s interior life. Nightsong features a grouping of Charleston’s new paintings on canvas, ink drawings, and a site-specific mural installation on the gallery’s large back wall. Charleston’s work digs deeply into the psychological recesses of identity, offering a liminal space where roles of female identification, artist, societal expectations, and familial responsibilities collide.

Charleston begins with drawing a self-portrait, and allows herself to be led by stories that emerge in her process of making. Describing this journey she says: "I begin with the self-portrait, then I derail it. This is what I am underneath. I am a river of this. All this mush and magic." Charleston draws inspiration from mythologies, folk tales, psychological narratives, dreams, memories, TV programs, and her life as a mother. Her muted paintings recall the immediacy and refinement of her ink drawings—deceptively simple, yet rich with recognizable forms that unfold into layered, intimate narratives. Figures embrace and entwine, bodies meld into one another or merge with animal counterparts, forming human-animal hybrids that lend the work a mythic, dreamlike quality. These compositions act as quiet stages for the theater of interior life, where characters seem absorbed in their own psychological worlds. Each painting offers a kind of window—into solitude, connection, and the tender, complicated rituals of care.

Words by Aimee Friberg of CULT Aimee Friberg Gallery