See Through is one of the latest manifestations of Beverly Semmes’s ongoing Feminist Responsibility Project (FRP), a series of absurd, sexy, enigmatic canvases that conceal and complicate images originally gleaned from vintage gentlemen’s magazines. In 2003, Semmes was given a collection of Hustler and Penthouse back-issues. Spending time with the images and the women contained therein, the artist experienced a conflicting combination of desires — a motherly urge to protect these subjects from the sexualized gaze, and the impulse to spend a potentially unhealthy amount of time engaging the material.

Vessels appear across Semmes’s interdisciplinary practice, serving as a metaphor for the female body and the source of its perceived value: its potential to bear children, and its role as a receptacle for desire. The title "See Through" speaks to the experience of looking at this new body of work — the voyeuristic urge to peer through and penetrate Semmes’s curtains of color — and the experience of meeting her sitter's gaze directly, as happens here. Once executed on the intimate scale of magazine pages, the artist's latest paintings render their subjects larger than life, further complicating the balance of power between subject, object, and viewer.