Notice Board

Digging a Hole with a Garden Hose: Celebrations of Queer Survival Through Failure
Art NOW series featuring Shelby Charlesworth
April 2 | noon | University Recital Hall
Free admission, everyone welcome

Digging a Hole with a Garden Hose is a collection of works that examine the systemic impact of capitalism creating personal feelings of failure, as well as how perception of failure societally as it relates to experiences of gender and queer identity. Through mass-production of small, familiar items like buttons, pencils, and handkerchiefs, I repeatedly and laboriously create amassments of delicate objects – emphasizing themes of labour and collective fragilities. These, alongside quilts, tiles and other labour-intensive handmade objects, form a large interdisciplinary body of work that underlie the necessity for empathy to understand our weighted world. Cracked flesh, an aching back, still, I must persist.

Shelby Charlesworth is an interdisciplinary artist and educator, currently located in Mohkinstsis (Calgary). Shelby began her career attending Alberta University of the Arts where she participated in an exchange program at PNCA in Portland, Oregon in 2015 – graduating in 2017 with a BFA in Painting. Shelby then received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Connecticut in 2021, where she later taught as Instructor of Record for Sculpture. Following her MFA, she relocated to Los Angeles where she worked as a studio assistant, sculptor and ceramicist before returning to Sikookotoki (Lethbridge) in 2022 to be the Sculpture Technician at the University of Lethbridge. She is now a Sessional Instructor in Sculpture at the University of Calgary, the Community Partnerships Coordinator at the Kiyooka Ohe Arts Centre and Studio Manager of Burnt Toast Printmaking Studio.

Her primary focus both through education and personal practice is community engagement and arts accessibility through visual language. Shelby has an upcoming solo exhibition opening in the main Gallery at Casa on April 5, 2025. She will be speaking about her research relating to the opioid epidemic’s impact on Canada at The Bows in Calgary on April 12th. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Image: Shelby Charlesworth, Untitled, Lost-wax Bronze Sculpture, 4.25” x 6” x 2.25”, 2024, Documentation by Angeline Simon.