Idea Post #2: Memory

photo credit: http://www.cinepremiere.com.mx/files/images/eternalsunshine.jpg

from the movie, Eternal Sunshine and the Spotless Mind

Memories. Many of us believe that memories make us who we are. That because something happened to us and we remember it that this is what shapes us. However, this is not true. Memories aren't really anything. Once the reality is over and we start to remember certain events as truths, our brains immediately start to change and distort what really happened. When you are looking back on things that happened when you were young, like say a birthday party, you are stringing together many different emotions and faces and things you did. With each string of memory that you place together is like putting together a bunch of fake realities. You are painting a picture of what used to be true. And each time that you look back on this same birthday, you remember it slightly differently than you did the last time you remembered it. Your emotions affect the way you remember something. So every memory isn't the same as the last and it is always changing the way you perceive it.

(the ideas and research from this paragraph is taken from Radiolab: Episode #304: memory and forgetting)

Howard, Jan, and Laurie Simmons. "Picturing Memories." Laurie Simmons: the Music of Regret. Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997. 15-16. Print.

We as photographers deal very much with memory. Think of photo albums either on facebook or in reality, that someone has taken many photos of an event, (ie wedding, graduation, party) in hopes to never forget that moment. People believe that recording the event in the form of pictures solidifies the moment. Many photographers build projects based on memory. Laurie Simmons does this in a different way. Laurie Simmons draws from her childhood and the memories that she has from then. "Rather than records of events, memories are constructions that record our interpretations of events. Emotions determine how we experience daily routine happening..."(Howard, pg. 15) This is how Jan Howard describes Laurie Simmons's work. The memory that drives the work and records how she feels about the memory. This lines up perfectly with the idea that every time you think of something, your emotion has influence on that memory.

Memory relates to my work and work I'd like to make in different ways. I am interested in memory in the way that Simmons is interested in memory. I have created memories of my mother and my grandmother together in a place that doesn't exist. Like Simmons I am creating my own memory of this event. It in some way is based on true events but is distorted in my mind and in my creation. And I'd like to continue making work in this fashion. I think I want to do childhood, or growing up for themes of new work.

Howard, Jan, and Laurie Simmons. "Picturing Memories." Laurie Simmons: the Music of Regret. Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997. 15-16. Print.

"Radiolab: Episode #304: Memory and Forgetting." RadioLab. WNYC, New York, New York. Radio.

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 .