POT PEEK introduces 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.
The artist’s response is a cornucopia of mixed-media interventions that submerge the exposed protagonists in translucent layers of strategically applied, gestural color. According to curator Ingrid Schaffner, who foregrounded earlier FRP’s in the 57th Carnegie International, “Taken as a whole, Beverly Semmes’s FRP is a kind of camp. It disrupts the normal flow of pornography by strategically amplifying the awkward and obvious construction of the pose, the gaze, the exploitation, and the bodies that make it work.” This is especially true of the work in POT PEEK, in which uncovered ankles and elbows allow us a glimpse of exposed flesh while piquing our interest in the hidden parts of the composition.
The title, POT PEEK, references the vessels that 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 male desire. Further, the title 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 subjects' gazes directly, as happens in See Through and Eye Tooth. Once executed on the intimate scale of magazine pages, the FRP’s in POT PEEK render their subjects larger than life, further complicating the balance of power between subject, object, and viewer.
