Dress MacLeod from Tartan Sets

A key member of the Pictures Generation, Sarah Charlesworth explores the structures and assumptions that undergird visual production. Her work evolved as she began to notice how “values were being constructed in mass culture that informed the way we think about the world, our possibilities as human beings, how it is to be a woman, how it is to be a man, how it is to be American or a white person or whatever,” as she has said. For her series “Objects of Desire” from the early ‘80s, which plays with the language of advertising, Charlesworth appropriated images of animals, Hollywood gowns, or masks, among other subjects, isolating them from their context and setting them against bright, monochromatic backgrounds.

East Orange, NJ, USA