these works, Semmel positions bodies in a landscape. This new way of working was characteristic of Semmel's painterly approach in the 1980s, which was a decade when she began to push her practice in new directions. Writing about this period, Semmel stated, “I combined realist and painterly methods insisting that a unified style was not preordained.” With this series, she aimed to communicate the psychological experience of feeling lost in a crowd—alone and isolated even on a crowded beach. Series of paintings made in Semmel's East Hampton studio. In 1987 she bought a house in Springs, East Hampton, where she continues to work every summer. Locker Room series (late 1980s) Beginning with Mirror Mirror (1988), Semmel depicts camera as a "device to frame and question issues of perception and representation." Semmel took photographs in women's locker rooms, using the mirror and the camera "as strategies to destabilize the point of view (who is looking at whom) and to engage the viewer as a participant...my paintings revealed a body at a more advanced age, and showed me aggressively pointing the camera at the viewer." Overlays series (1992–1996) The Overlays series (1992–96), combines conceptual and formal concerns that echo many of Joan Semmel's previous investigations. For this body of work, she used pre-existing paintings from her Erotic Series (1972) as a background for gestural images of nude, middle-aged female bodies taken from her prior Locker-Room paintings (1988–91). These works represent a fertile moment of formal experimentation as Semmel began exploring color and transparencies—compositional elements that she continues to refine in her present day work. Writing about this series, she observes, “both non-naturalistic color and linear overlays of complementary or contrasting images, again recall abstract elements, but also provoke a suggestion of time, motion, or memory.” Mannequins (1996–2001) Inspired by old mannequins she found on the street, Semmel worked with these "idealized versions of the female body...as alter egos to explore the isolation and anomie of objectification and fetishization. The haunting beautiful faces, broken parts and empty armholes were eloquent witnesses to the way women were valued for their youth and beauty and discarded in later years as powerless and no longer viable." With Camera (2001–2006) The first time Semmel purposefully poses in front of a mirror with the camera. Shifting Images (2006–2013) In Shifting Images, Joan Semmel paints her body in motion. Layered and blurred compositions, these works suggest instability, movement, and