Artist Entry I - Laurie Simmons

While researching new artists online I discovered Laurie Simmons work.   Art21 has always been a good site for finding up and coming artists with  a strong drive of creativity.    While I don’t have a desire to mimic her  I feel a huge link between her imagery as far as subject matter.  It’s partly the ideas that are presented and partly the look of the imagery that interest me in her work.   In  an art21 interview Laurie said, “the whole notion of frozen time was completely new—and that’s what I was doing,”  [1] which is something  I am doing in my work as well.   In my current project I am stopping an object from it’s continued path of decay and asking the viewer to engage with it:  think about it’s past, present, and the exact moment captured. They have a nostalgic feeling to them -- something that I’m   drawn to and tend to incorporate without thinking about it in my own work.   I really want my visual to  be a commentary on the past, where they have been and possibly where they are going to. “I never think in terms of narrative. Never. There are certainly moments that occur but the pictures aren’t loaded with a what-came-before/what-came-after attitude. They’re almost moments you happen upon: somebody standing somewhere, or riding somewhere. They’re not meant to be loaded with the tension of things about to occur, or things that have occurred.”[2]  I’ve always had a hard time working in the “series” mind frame, I tend to work in the mindset of making a solid image that stands on it’s own.  It would be a contradiction for me to say I wasn’t concerned with what came before or what after, but that certainly wasn’t why I started photographing objects that were thrown out.  It just was really interesting to me how in the city you could find just about anything in the trash, something you would never see in a small town like the one I grew up in.  

[1]"Art:21 . Laurie Simmons . Interview & Videos | PBS." PBS. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 Sept. 2010. <http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/simmons/clip1.html>.


[2]Yablonsky, Linda. "BOMB Magazine: Laurie Simmons by Linda Yablonsky." BOMB Magazine: Home Page. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 Sept. 2010. <http://bombsite.com/issues/57/articles/1985>.

Artist Biography

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. 

Images by Laurie Simmons:

All images © Laurie Simmons

Interview: http://bombsite.com/issues/57/articles/1985

Gallery:http://www.skarstedt.com/index.php?mode=artists&object_id=80

Laurie Simmons: http://www.lauriesimmons.net