Using a standard format of thirty-by-forty inches, Objects of Desire is comprised of five sub-series, each focusing on the colors and formal attributes of a specific cultural arena. While the first group examines the language of gender and sexuality with an emphasis on the color red, Objects of Desire II (1985-86) directs its attention to the concept of nature, as a kind of ideal or fantasy in our popular imaginations. Proffered against a royal green expanse, the silhouette of a single goat with a crown of red flowers arouses visions of pagan or indigenous ceremonies. By removing all of its contextual signifiers, Charlesworth dissects the object’s latent history, usage, and connotations.

Themes of religion and spirituality unite Objects of Desire III (1986). Here images of gods, figureheads, and classical icons from art history or archeology consider society’s desire for transcendental enlightenment. In some, Charlesworth presents a single, centralized referent—such as Madonna (1986), in which a sea of cool grey draws out the space between the icon’s unresolved meaning and the viewer’s appeal for ontological closure. In other works, such as El Dorado (1986) and Gold (1986), the artist presents a multiplicity of objects, mimicking the abundant tableaus of advertising, editorials, and graphic design.

For the final two sub-series of Objects of Desire, Charlesworth experiments with increasingly complex syntactical relationships. In Bowl (1986), the viewer is “confronted with a pure abstraction, and realizes, on a certain level, where the symbolism begins and ends.”[1] For her diptych Work (1987), she combines semantic elements to consider the artistic process in relation to value—as signified by the Tiffany & Co. blue. Here, a hex of abracadabra is paired with crude Iron Age tools, suggesting both the immense labor required to create art(work) as well as the kind of “magic spin that makes it come alive.”[2] 

In Work, and other diptychs and triptychs from the series, Charlesworth arranges the frames contiguously but on different levels, such that one recedes slightly behind another. In Wisdom Through Initiation (1989), a jeweled dancing deity bisects an inset panel of golden daffodils. In Garden of Delight (1989), a statuette with protruding phalluses advances in front of a secret keyhole garden—a metaphor for male sexuality, desire in general, and the unattainable. Encoded within these multiplanar juxtapositions is a suggestion of shifting or unresolved interpretations. The implication that an image might slip forward or slide back reveals the viewer’s subconscious as the true controlling force.