Garden of Delight from the series Objects of Desire IV.5,

1987–88

Charlesworth was a key member of the "Pictures Generation," a group of artists who emerged in the United States in the late 1970s. For Charlesworth, photography was a medium as well as a theme, one whose objectivity and authority she put into question. Garden of Delight is part of a larger series of works titled Objects of Desire (1983–1988) in which the artist photographed iconic cultural images found in magazines and printed them onto glossy monochromatic grounds. Here, Charlesworth juxtaposes a keyhole view into a majestic garden of paradise with a picture of an ancient Pompeiian polyphallic wind chime. This pairing conjures an interplay between the natural and the constructed world as well as female and male bodies. The photographs are printed on separate panels that fit together like a puzzle: they (and their content) are literally hinged together. Between 2012 and her untimely death in 2013, Charlesworth served as Class of 1932 Visiting Lecturer in the Visual Arts at the Lewis Center for the Arts.