Beverly Semmes (a graduate of SMFA) gave a lecture at the MFA yesterday. Her work is often described as, and certainly appears to be, very feminist, so I was surprised and interested to hear that this was not her foremost concern, or even something that she had originally considered. Semmes described how one of her earlier pieces had been written up as a "pool of menstrual blood", and how she had been surprised and embarrassed, thinking that she had simply been making landscapes.
It is impossible in contextualizing Semmes' work to ignore the feminist connotations of what she has created, intended or not. She works in female garments, placed together with empty vessels (either clay or glass, both of which are made by coiling). In order to understand where Semmes is really coming from though, it is important to look back at where she is stemming from.
Out of grad school Semmes and her boyfriend (now husband) moved to a psychiatric hospital - where he worked and they were offered free housing. There Semmes became consumed by the hospital's extremely well manicured garden. She began to making garments which reflected the space, and making super-8 films of friends wearing the garments and walking around the garden (second image). It is here that Semmes identity as an artist began to become more apparent. She described the way no one could quite do it the way she wanted. People moved too fast, looked back at the camera, overacted. It was obvious that even if she could not express it at the time, she had a clear intentionality for these pieces. She described it as something like the "marking" or "claiming" of space.
This continued into her other pieces. By using scale, color, and once even smell, Semmes has a complete control over space. She chooses colors which she describes as both beautiful and nauseating, sometimes with a goal of "color contamination", where nothing is safe from the color, reflecting off of walls, clothes and skin of observers. She plays with this even further in pieces where the garment is the same color as the walls, making it not only difficult to locate but almost claiming the entire room as her art. She ups the scale in every one of her pieces, making dresses that are unwearably huge and with oddly pushed proportions.
One of her more interesting pieces (in my opinion) was a small room, with orange curtains surrounding it, a couple of red pots, and a large circle of tan bandaids stuck to the floor in the middle of the room. Semmes states that although it cannot be taken too literally (which would leave no place for the pots) she thinks that the bandaids were in some ways standing in for skin, and the curtains one of her dresses. This places the viewer in an undefined space, between skin and fabric, something I thought was really cool, and goes along with her interest in marking or claiming space.
She showed and discussed work than I can describe here (I unfortunately was unable to find pictures of most of this work, including much of what I was so interested in), but some other things she showed included giant fluorescent yellow "poops" with a guard dressed in the same yellow, a sea of pink fabric (the guard again dressed in the same color, and often chosen to be an older woman), video and images of Semmes watching her feet (an exploration, she says, of the self-absorption involved in being an artist), and a collaboration with a dance studio - something which she again like her early super-8 films, disliked her lack of control over, and ended up making new work in response to this.
If you ever get an opportunity to see her work, I could not advise more that you do so. It is difficult to find too many images of her work on the web, and that aside her work is of an extremely experiential nature, and I have a feeling that photos only begin to scratch the surface.
Semmes' website
70min conversation lecture with Semmes and Glenn Adamson at the PA ICA
images: various sources including beverlysemmesstudio.com
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