Beverly Semmes at Leslie Tonkonow

Art in America, Oct, 2001 by Robert Mahoney

This exhibition marked something of a departure for Beverly Semmes. The enormous dresses with which she has draped gallery walls for over a decade were absent, supplanted by a more reductive interest in what can happen to fashion--or, more precisely, fabric--after it has been dropped on the floor. The untitled centerpiece of the exhibition was a mountain of tubes of chartreuse nylon fabric, stuffed with packing peanuts and intricately intertwined to a height of 10 feet at mid-gallery. A variation of one of three such works featured in a solo show at Philadelphia's Fabric Workshop in 2000, this monument to undress certainly commanded attention. As one circled the piece, its undulating forms began to snake around in an increasingly menacing manner: gently flowing fabric morphed into visions of churning emotion.

Semmes added to the installation's menace by dictating that the gallery director and employees wear chartreuse clothing of her design during the run of the show, to symbolize "the tyranny of style over substance." That may be, but for me, the whole scenario had substance, eerily harking back to '50s sci-fi movies, such as the classic Quartermass II, in which an alien blob in a remote factory is dutifully fed captured humans by minions wearing protective nylon uniforms. The apparent discomfort of the uniformed gallery personnel reinforced the sense of this particular entity's fairly substantial, if occult, power.

An intention to link finery and feces, both in formal terms and in the dingy districts of theories of fetishism, could also be felt, but the elegance of the installation's components generally left such ideas to be whispered by smaller works on the sidelines. Semmes is less cryptic about fetishism in photos and videos, especially those that dwell on her own feet dangling poolside or in the water. In one color photo, Her Feet Dangling in the Pool (2001), and one video, In the Pool (2000), her feet are covered, as in a toddler's early exploration of self-adornment, with a crazy patchwork of yellow and blue kids'-styled Band-Aids (the kind with Mickey Mouse and Aladdin printed all over). The mischievousness of this impromptu shodding adds to the sexual kick (at least for a foot fetishist) involved in an adult playing with her feet in a strange, creative way.