BEVERLY SEMMES: POT PEEK

3 February - 12 March 2022

BEVERLY SEMMES: POT PEEK
Susan Inglett Gallery is pleased to present Beverly Semmes's solo exhibition, POT PEEK, on view from 3 February 2022 through 12 March 2022.
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.
BEVERLY SEMMES, FIG LEAF, 2021

The artist’s response to these impulses is a cornucopia of mixed-media interventions that submerge the exposed protagonists in translucent layers of 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 sitter's gaze 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.
Modern Art Notes, Beverly Semmes, Reubens & Antiquity, AN interview with Tyler Green, 2022
The Feminist Responsibility Project is a purposefully grandiose title for a deeply personal project. The physicality of the work in POT PEEK suggests a quick and decisive process, however the series evolved slowly. For a while the pornographic source material sat mostly neglected in the artist's studio. Intermittently, Semmes would muse over the publications, eventually drawing on top of a page only to put the pile away again, gradually developing a way of engaging with the images.

'I think I can fix this' was the idea. I wanted to keep something about the magazine pages that was sensuous or even sexy, that I had some appreciation for, and take out the misogynistic content. If there was a place for me to make that correction, then that’s what I did.
- BEVERLY SEMMES, Hill & Dale, 2021
- BEVERLY SEMMES, Winter Wheat, 2021
As the project progressed, Semmes came to appreciate the magazines' production values. Recurring clichéd fantasies emerged, and the artist could not help but admire the contortions of imagination and body required to make each scene unique.

How many ways can you remake the ‘classic’ carwash — two women, washing a car, scantily dressed (or not dressed) — with sponges and soap? The magazine stories need to be freshly reinvented to make each issue different, but the subject is always the same. The art direction gets pushed to a place of creative invention.
- BEVERLY SEMMES, Eye Tooth, 2021
- BEVERLY SEMMES, See Through, 2021
Beverly Semmes's approach has been to use ink or paint to obscure the original image, controlling the viewer's access and experience. Allowing only a glimpse of thigh or winking eye, we experience a frustration and titillation that reminds us that we are at the mercy of a master of manipulation.

It became a performance working on them - I channelled my religious grandmother, I got in a zone where I was a censor and was doing the work that had to be done, and sometimes as a censor I would get mixed up and they would become more sexy than they were before.
- BEVERLY SEMMES, Tulips Two Feet, 2021
- BEVERLY SEMMES, Red See, 2021
BEVERLY SEMMES, Copper Curtain, 2021
Photo Credit: Lars Gundersen, Edition Copenhagen

BEVERLY SEMMES (b. 1958) shines a light on the paradoxes surrounding the representation of the female body in media and culture. Semmes gained early recognition for her fabric installations of large-scale feminine garments, and her ongoing Feminist Responsibility Project (FRP) creates an intermediary space in which queries involving female sexuality can take form. Semmes has been honored with many solo exhibitions, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the ICA Philadelphia; the MCA Chicago; and The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. Her work was most recently included in Witch Hunt at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the 57th Carnegie International. Semmes’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, among others.

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BEVERLY SEMMES: POT PEEK

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