Shoes have long operated as powerful markers of humanity, functioning simultaneously as utilitarian objects and as dense carriers of social, psychological, and spiritual meaning. Famous art historical examples, such as Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes and William Nicholson’s Miss Jekyll’s Gardening Boots, have shoes functioning as mirrors societal status, cultural values, and personal expression. They are objects that retain the trace of the body while remaining distinctly separate from it.

Surrealist treatments intensify this symbolic charge. Dalí’s fetishization of shoes, informed by Freudian psychoanalysis, frames footwear as one of humanity’s most potent fetish objects. René Magritte’s The Red Model, in which boots merge seamlessly into human feet, proposes an identity that is unstable and detachable, as interchangeable as the shoes we wear. Here, footwear becomes not merely an accessory but a extension of the self, collapsing the distinction between body and object in a way that feels both intimate and uncanny.

Shoes also carry sacred and ritual weight. Across religious traditions, removing shoes before entering holy spaces signifies humility and reverence. The ritual of priests removing their shoes to venerate the cross on Good Friday underscores footwear as an object that mediates between the profane and the sacred. Shoes mark the point at which the body is separated from the world, and where meaning accumulates through repeated acts of removal.

Beverly Semmes’ recent works synthesize these historical, psychological, and symbolic dimensions while folding them decisively into the logic of contemporary consumer desire. Her new works display soft sculptural bodices in faux fur, velvet, and fabric that are wall-mounted with Versace driving moccasins and Gucci monogrammed mules. The footwear rest atop the implied figure’s breasts, suggesting a prone body; mounted on the wall. They read simultaneously as footwear and as bodily surrogates, high value consumer objects that mimic anatomy. In considering her past series, The Feminist Responsibility Project, where pornographic magazine pages are cut out and painted over, it is hard not to consider the entanglement of pornography, luxury branding, and Semmes’ own handiwork into these visual economies.

In Semmes’ practice, sartorial forms do not merely stand in for bodies; They are intrinsic to humanity on a personal, psychological, and spiritual condition, allowing the viewer to oscillate between object and self, fetish and function, performance and embodiment. Through this oscillation, Semmes reasserts these items not only as personal artifacts, but as deeply embedded symbols within our cultural, psychological, and spiritual consciousness. She creates sites where desire, consumption, and selfhood remain unresolved.