BEVERLY SEMMES

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 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.

Semmes initiated FRP in the early 2000’s. A sculptor by training, she has long used massive scale, electric color and vessel forms— such as dresses, pots, and chandeliers— to mess with authority. Petunia filled a cathedral nave in the Netherlands with a lake of pink chiffon that pooled as if it were the skirt of the performer who sat in attendance. FRP newly expands the set of operations of this larger body of work.

While pairing Richard Artschwager's Southwestern landscapes with Semmes’ large fabric sculpture may initially strike viewers as incongruous, further investigation reveals layers of affinity. Artschwager is well known for paintings and sculpture that turn the commonplace decidedly uncommon. Semmes' work in fabric and ceramics likewise operates in the realm of the uncanny, though generally considered within the context of feminism and craft. Surprisingly, as this show highlights, landscape deeply informs the work of both.

Constructed from dozens of smaller pots these strange sentries are armed with multiple handles. Inviting and intimidating, the colossi stand with the dresses, alert to some unseen force or presence. Like the title “Bow,” which can be read as an ornament, a curtsy, or a weapon, these works draw meaning from a range of cultural, social, and political contexts. In this exhibition Semmes deepens her longstanding engagement with feminism and the erotics of materiality, exploring the dynamic relation of body to sculptural form.

Beverly Semmes’s second exhibition with Susan Inglett Gallery probes the powers of a landmark modernist sculpture by an iconic feminist artist: Meret Oppenheim’s Object (aka the fur lined tea cup) of 1936. As Semmes heads down the rabbit hole of artistic inspiration she takes artist Erle Loran’s 1943 book, Cezanne’s Compositions as her guide: Loran’s attempts to diagram and unlock the powers of Cezanne’s paintings are a touching artifact of pure formalism and ardor.

The Feminist Responsibility Project (FRP) is a collection of images and objects produced by crude gestures and the application of ink and paint to defile pornography. Picture a committee of rogue censors responding to the stained, dog-eared pages of vintage erotica. Teasingly they blot out select passages of nudity while allowing others to slip through their fingers unmarked. In the end, these haphazard interventions serve better to direct rather than divert our attention from the naughty bits.