JESSICA JANE CHARLESTON: Nightsong

April 24 - July 12, 2025

Artist Reception: April 24, 5-7 PM

"She has the poison inside her, she talks to snakes and they guide her." Adrienne Lenker

"Secret thoughts and long internalised memories were uncovered, psychological knots were picked apart and small gestures of the everyday were not overlooked. If necessary, I would return to the same thoughts again and again, either repeating or making something new from them. It felt like I was turning thoughts over, to examine them and confront myself with them." Emma Talbot

CULT Aimee Friberg is pleased to announce Nightsong, a solo exhibition by London based artist Jessica Jane Charleston in our San Francisco space (1401 16th Street). Nightsong, the artist’s first solo exhibition in North America, and first solo presentation with the gallery, opens on April 24, 2025 and runs through July 12. The artist will be present for a public reception on Thursday, April 24 from 5 to 7 PM.

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.

In Nightsong, Charleston brings into focus the emotional labor of womanhood—the lifelong work of caretaking, holding, and nurturing. Her paintings speak to the responsibilities, pain, and joy that are integral to what it means, as she says, "to be all at once a mother, a lover, a teacher, a daughter, a sister, a friend." There is a palpable tension in the work: between comfort and apprehension, serenity and foreboding. Each piece becomes a diary of everyday existence, carrying the weight of feeling, memory, and transformation. Through tender compositions and lyrical linework, Charleston offers a quiet but insistent meditation on the complexity of our relationships—to others, and to ourselves.

Jessica Jane Charleston was born in 1986 in Bury-St-Edmunds, Suffolk, United Kingdom. She graduated from The Royal Drawing School in 2017, and was awarded the Young Artist Award from the Royal Watercolour Society, UK in 2020. She has exhibited her paintings in London including with Guts Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, London Art Fair (with Nunnery Gallery), Hauser & Wirth’s Mayfair Farm Shop, the Albright, and the Royal Academy. Recently she was selected to exhibit at Christies, London celebrating Picasso: A 50 Year Legacy. She has been in residence at the Dumfries House, Scotland, Moritz-Heyman in Pignano, Italy, and at Firstsite in Essex, England. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Dumfries House in Scotland, Moritz-Heyman in Italy, Stuart Hall Library, and HM King Charles in the UK.