Artist Post #2: Laurie Simmons

"Walking Gun/ The Music of Regret"
2006

"Long House (Red Bathroom)"

2004

"The Boxes (Ardis Vinklers) Ballroom/ Detail"

2005

The Music of Regret from Laurie Simmons Studio on Vimeo.

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). he 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).

-Art 21

Laurie Simmons has been a constant influence on my work. I stumbled upon her a few years ago and became very interested. She “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.” (Art 21) Her play with memory and time relates to other projects I have done in the past. I used memory in my work with my mother and my grandmother. In this project, I created family memories that my mom and her mom might have had in this constructed reality. The memory in this case is invented, made up. Simmons also creates memories in her work as well. Simmons uses cut outs or dolls or dummies to create work that looks like someone's memory. The photographs look real for the first few seconds and then you start to notice the strange details from lighting or cut paper or dolls. This realization grabs the viewer's attention and you start to realize that its not real. And that it never was. All of the photograph is a fabrication. Then you can go between the real and the unreal. What you want to imagine and what you know to be true. But at one point, Laurie Simmons set up this scene. She put the paper dolls and furniture together and had just enough time to shoot the created scene. That really happened. But the photograph isn't there for the viewer to see the making of the image. The photograph is there to present this false memory. A memory that no one in particular had and perhaps a memory that has never come to be. This idea is evident in almost all of her work and in her more recent photo series such as “The Boxes”, 2005. Her work continues to inspire me.




“[Simmon's] sometimes-dreamy, sometimes-kitsch, slightly unsettling scenes say something profound about American culture...”
-Dirty Mag

“In Simmons’s toy world we immediately comprehend how stifling such real-world environments are, and how limiting is the petty-bourgeois esthetic they reflect.”
-Art in America

Link to website:

http://www.lauriesimmons.net/

Link to interviews:

http://www.lauriesimmons.net/index.php?mode=objectlist&section_id=164

Links to galleries:

http://www.salon94.com/artistProjects/2/work_7.htm

http://www.skarstedt.com/index.php?mode=artists

http://www.carolinanitsch.com/

http://www.baldwingallery.com/onview.htm

All pictures are from Art:21 and video is from the artist's website.

"Art:21 . Laurie Simmons . Biography . Documentary Film." PBS. 2007. Web. 13 Sept. 2010. http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/simmons/index.html# .

Gloede, Marc. "Laurie Simmons - Reviews." Art in America. 01 Jan. 2009. Web. 13 Sept. 2010. http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/laurie-simmons-/.

Matthew, Kristen. "Laurie Simmons: Master of Puppets." DIRTY MAGAZINE. Web. 13 Sept. 2010. http://dirty-mag.com/01/art_lsimmons.html .