MEDFORD, Mass. — Material works bookend Beverly Semmes’s Boulders / Flag / Flip / Kick on the Tufts College Artwork Galleries. But the exhibition’s 45-year span evidences a dramatic vary of pursuits. Efficiency is one throughline, with objects impressed by costumes or props taking up an impartial existence. One other is the insistent materiality of cloth, clay, and even glass alongside the exploration of digital mediation. Lastly, Semmes constructs a fancy interaction of presence and absence in her investigation of girls’s our bodies as loci for corrosive stereotypes and ebullient individuality.
The incongruous nouns and verbs of the exhibition title are drawn from particular person items inside every of 4 loosely thematic sections. The earliest work within the exhibition, “Boulders” (1980) — a collection of huge, irregular objects comprised of cloth draped over hen wire relationship to Semmes’s undergraduate years at Tufts — is represented by projected pictures documenting its motion via numerous websites within the higher Boston space. The primary work within the present itself, nevertheless, is “Buried Treasure” (1994), during which efficiency morphs into set up. It takes the type of a crushed velvet gown, flattened on the wall, one sleeve transitioning into an extended, slim tube that spills out throughout the gallery flooring in loops. An accompanying photograph reveals a determine standing by the shore sporting the gown, which extends into coils throughout the panorama. Although the work is now firmly a gallery object, a component of efficiency persists since its association is adjusted for every website.
“Flip” (2024) melds Semmes’s beforehand distinct portray and textile parts, although its utilization of flipped picture fragments to drag aside and recombine representations of the feminine physique is typical of her work. Beginning within the early 2000s, she started marking up photographs present in classic Penthouse magazines, reworking them into disquieting silhouettes. The continued collection, with the umbrella title FRP (Feminist Duty Challenge), has since come to incorporate scans of her personal manipulated photographs, enlarged and printed onto canvases which can be then overpainted. The result’s a fancy palimpsest.
Beverly Semmes, “Wrap” and “Green Shoe” (each 2024) (all pictures Martha Buskirk/Hyperallergic)
“Wrap” (2024), which features a portrait of a former Penthouse mannequin named Nickie within the higher proper, represents one other convergence. Semmes had already been engaged on FRP when she met the mannequin by likelihood, and she or he has recounted the heightened sense of connection she felt to her personal physique when working with pictures of somebody she knew. As if this weren’t layered sufficient, she additionally determined to digitally switch a few of that collaged imagery onto cloth, which grew to become the idea for a collaboration with clothier Jennifer Minniti. Clothes they produced underneath the moniker Carwash Collective, in addition to video of an related style present, seem in an adjoining area as a coda to the exhibition.
The ultimate gallery, like the primary, is each an meeting of impartial works and an set up particularly configured for this website. “Not Here” (1999), an expanse of white chiffon and organza throughout the gallery flooring, may seem luxurious, even frivolous, had been it not for the big yellow X extending throughout its floor — and because the wall textual content notes, it commemorates the lack of her grandmother. Close by, the video “Kick” (2005), during which ft abruptly getting into and exiting the body propel amorphous pink types round one other white subject, introduces a special form of tactility. Additional punctuating the ensemble are vertical purple ceramic items reflecting Semmes’s longstanding opulent and visceral manipulation of vessel types. “Billboard” (2025), consisting of three colossal gown types comprised of crushed velvet, looms over the gallery, its shimmering expanse ominously punctuated by a scattering of purple circles.
Semmes’s work tends to lure viewers in with texture, colour, or barely absurd setups, however materials sensuality rapidly shades over into one thing extra unsettling. As seen on this exhibition, her engagement with diversified media is animated by a constant sensibility evident within the interaction of embodied presence and ephemeral hint.
Beverly Semmes, “Wrap” and “Green Shoe” (each 2024)
Set up view of Beverly Semmes: Boulders / Flag / Flip / Kick, with “Not Here” (1999) within the foreground and “Billboard” (2025) within the background
Set up view of Beverly Semmes: Boulders / Flag / Flip / Kick
Beverly Semmes, “Boulders” (1980), digital scans of photographic slides
Beverly Semmes, “Flip” (2024), fake fur, chiffon, acrylic over {photograph} printed on canvas
Beverly Semmes: Boulders / Flag / Flip / Kick continues at Aidekman Arts Middle (40 Talbot Avenue, Medford), a part of Tufts College Artwork Galleries, via November 23. The exhibition was curated by Dina Deitsch with Beverly Semmes, Camilo Alvarez, and Deniz Bora.
