Laurie Simmons
Laurie Simmons was born on Long Island, New York, in 1949.
She received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia (1971).
Simmons stages photographs and films with paper dolls, finger puppets,
ventriloquist dummies, and costumed dancers as “living objects,” animating
a dollhouse world suffused with nostalgia and colored by an adult’s
memories, longings, and regrets. Simmons’s work blends psychological,
political and conceptual approaches to art making, transforming
photography’s propensity to objectify people, especially women, into a
sustained critique of the medium. Mining childhood memories and media
constructions of gender roles, her photographs are charged with an eerie,
dreamlike quality. On first glance her works often appear whimsical, but
there is a disquieting aspect to Simmons’s child’s play as her characters
struggle over identity in an environment in which the value placed on
consumption, designer objects, and domestic space is inflated to absurd
proportions. Simmons’s first film, “The Music of Regret” (2006), extends
her photographic practice to performance, incorporating musicians,
professional puppeteers, Alvin Ailey dancers, Hollywood cinematographer Ed
Lachman, and actress Meryl Streep. She has received many awards, including
the Roy Lichtenstein Residency in the Visual Arts at the American Academy
in Rome (2005); and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation (1997) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1984). She has
had major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006);
Baltimore Museum of Art (1997); San Jose Museum of Art, California (1990);
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1987); and has participated in two Whitney
Biennials (1985, 1991). Simmons lives and works in New York.
