The large-scale sculpture created expressly for her recent survey at Tufts is composed of three silver robes, punctuated by red circles made with crushed velvet. Billboards (2025) hearkens back to Semmes’ signature fabric sculptures that initiated her artistic career. The two outermost robes face the wall away from the viewer, as if seeking a clandestine moment, while the central robe stands guard, facing forward. A continuous wall of metallic textile, the robes evoke the adjacent performance photograph Three Figures in Cloud Hats and Purple Velvet Bathrobes at the Table (1991). Here, three models wearing Cloud Hats, also included in the exhibition, appear to commune, or conspire, around a studio table. Originally performed, and now exhibited as wall sculpture, these seven aluminum mesh Cloud Hats (1991) defy the scale of human proportion. This is to be expected of Semmes, who, even in 1991, was “not a tailor for the physical body,” but “a visionary of the phantasmatic one,” as Catherine Liu offered in a review of the artist’s early work.
More phantasmic bodies populate the center of the Gallery in the form of the totemic, clay sculptures, Fish and Suitcase (both 2012), painted red and standing slightly shorter than Semmes herself. These vessels, mottled by fingerprints, serve as a record of the artist’s performative approach to her studio practice, grounded in a hands-on physicality and instinct born of experience.
Billboard’s accenting red circles rhyme with the trio of fluorescent-red clay sculptures – evidence that Semmes is committed to building upon the visual motifs that reappear throughout her practice. She delivers on this promise again in a new sculpture, where freshly minted Gucci loafers are framed by the artist’s signature bodice. Embracing the readymade object, the artist flips extravagant footwear from a quasi-functional object into a form evocative of breastplates, complete with New York Yankees hardware, a recognizable stand-in for the domestic center of cultural capital. Semmes gestures at her dilemma of how to address the commodity-obsessed culture these coveted loafers signify; she is both a fan and critic, negotiating how desire inserts itself into one’s home, body, and personality. Even for those who cast themselves outside of this sphere, or try to leave it, Semmes reminds us that our implication is deeply embedded.
