Beverly Semmes “Pot Peek”

Susan Inglett Gallery

[Image: Beverly Semmes"Eye Tooth" (2021) Ink, acrylic over photograph printed on canvas, 54 7/8 x 40 in.]

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Susan Inglett Gallery presents BEVERLY SEMMES: POT PEEK.

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 gleaned from vintage gentlemen’s magazines. In 2003, Semmes was gifted 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 male 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 coverage. 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 exposed ankles and gloved elbows allow us to peek at 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, POT PEEK speaks to the experience of looking at this body of work — specifically the voyeuristic urge to penetrate and peer through Semmes’s curtains of color — and the experience of meeting the subject’s gaze directly, as in See Through and Eye Tooth. Once executed on the intimate scale of magazine pages, the FRP’s in POT PEEK are larger than life, further complicating the balance of power between subject, object, and viewer.

POT PEEK is on view concurrently with Beverly Semmes’s exhibition at JOAN, Los Angeles with Carwash Collective (Beverly Semmes and Jennifer Minniti) and Emily Mast. The project, titled POOL, is co-presented by the Hammer Museum and ICA Los Angeles and will be on view through 5 February 2022.

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; and the MCA Chicago. 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.