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BEVERLY SEMMES
SUSAN INGLETT GALLERY -
Susan Inglett Gallery is pleased to congratulate BEVERLY SEMMES on her recent commendation as an Academician by the National Academy of Design. In a tradition dating back to 1825, Academicians are recognized by their peers for their remarkable contributions to the story of American art and architecture. Each year, current National Academicians nominate and select the artists and architects inducted into the NAD.
Following, we will highlight the wide-ranging body of work that garnered Semmes this recognition, from large-scale fabric installations to her on-going Feminist Responsibility Project (FRP). Throughout her practice, Semmes shines a light on the paradoxes surrounding the representation of the female body in media and culture. Be it oversized tulle dresses, unconventional ceramics, or painterly interventions on the pages of pornographic magazines, her artwork— and the feminist modes of inquiry it inspires— continues to create an intense physical and emotional connection with the viewer.
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NATIONAL ACADEMY OF DESIGN INDUCTION VIDEO, 2020
Courtesy of the National Academy of Design, NYC -
Bow (Blue Curtain)
2016Ethereal blue tulle dresses line walls shoulder to shoulder. Bent or bowed at the waist, attenuated sleeves sweeping the floor, the forms suggest a deflation of breath and anticipated inhalation. Gently disturbed by passing bodies and the breeze, this corporeal curtain is in a constant state of subtle movement. Like the title Bow, which can be read as an ornament, a curtsy, or a weapon, the work draws meaning from a range of cultural, social, and political contexts.
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CARWASH COLLECTIVE FASHION SHOW WITH JENNIFER MINNITI
SUSAN INGLETT GALLERY, NYC, 2017 -
During her 2017 solo exhibition, Bow, Semmes presented CarWash Collective in collaboration with fashion designer Jennifer Minniti. For one evening only, the two staged a runway show of Minniti's designs complemented by Semmes' ceramic vessels. Their label considers the dynamics of fashion and politics as Minniti designs clothing incorporating imagery culled from Semmes' Feminist Responsibility Project (FRP). Wrapping the models in cloth printed with pornographic images, though censored and sheathed in the artist's brushstrokes, acts as a doubling first in the painting and later when the clothing is worn.
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Semmes continues to investigate materiality and tactility through her enigmatic ceramic pots. Like her FRP works and her large dress installations, the artist's ceramics challenge norms by not behaving according to expectations. Creating anti-ceramics— pots that defy the conventions of the vessel— Semmes indulges in a sense of visceral, infantile pleasure while denying the viewer’s fetishism of clay or, for that matter, flesh.
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BEVERLY SEMMES, Pink Pot, 2008 ●
Collection of the Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs
In the early 2000s, Semmes was gifted a cache of vintage pornographic magazines. In an attempt to shield both viewer and sitter, the artist carefully altered each image with swatches of colorful inks. Curiously, the artist's partial concealment of the underlying image only served to amplify the highly constructed tableaux. Semmes presents this discord between the act of shielding and of pleasure not as two mutually exclusive poles, but rather as an intermediary space in which queries regarding female sexuality take a new form.
Pink Pot (2008), at left, is a work from the FRP (Feminist Responsibility Project) series. Here the artist cloaks the nude body or vessel, with a vessel resembling one of her own ceramic pots. This work, part of the Tang Museum's permanent collection, is now on view in their exhibition, Never Done: 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond, which explores the issues and challenges women in the United States have faced, and continue to face, in politics and society through 100 works by female and non-binary artists.
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BEVERLY SEMMES, Spider Web, 2020
An invitation to participate in the Carnegie International in 2018 provided Semmes the opportunity to expand upon her work with FRP through a series of life-size paintings, transferring and enlarging her work on paper to printed canvas. At this scale, the welter of applied cover-up marks become bold, painterly gestures, and the life-size figures confront the viewer eye-to-eye. Semmes continued this body of work in her recent solo exhibition, Red, in the Gallery earlier this year.
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Photo: Edition Copenhagen / Lars Gundersen
BEVERLY SEMMES was born in Washington, DC. She received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in addition to a BA and BFA from the Boston Museum School, Tufts University. A selection of works by Semmes was exhibited in the 57th Carnegie International, curated by Ingrid Schaffner. Next year, she will participate in the group exhibition, Witch Hunt, organized by Connie Butler and Anne Ellegood, at the Hammer Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions include the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, DC; the ICA Philadelphia; the MCA Chicago; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and an exhibition co-organized by the Grinnell College Museum of Art, Grinnell and the Frances Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Albright Knox Art Gallery, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Hammer Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art among others.
BEVERLY SEMMES AND THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF DESIGN
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