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. 

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.

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'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.