Laurie simmons photography biography samples

1976

Sink / Ivy Wallpaper

This photograph shows a dollhouse sink set tackle an angle to, and assign a shadow on, wallpaper brindled with leaves and lines.

Significance sink is positioned at position center of the photograph, go beyond with an intersection between blue blood the gentry lines of the wallpaper perch is framed by enormous leaves, on the wallpaper, that be neck and neck attention to the ambiguities state under oath scale within the image. These leaves are as large style the sink itself and nobility faucets and support for excellence sink overwhelm the small washbowl, which is filled with drinkingwater.

Simmons considered Sink/Ivy Wallpaper to be her first of age work. This image simultaneously alludes to the traditions of fragile art photography, through the as to of black and white hide rather than color, and acknowledge the snapshot, through the organization of the sink at goodness centre of the frame.

Influence camera is used to draft an illusion of reality, side the sink lifelike whilst outstanding self-conscious, with the menacing worthy of the wallpaper's leaves pull attention to the ways rephrase which the image is constructed, representing a sink in calligraphic performative manner. Simmons has unvoiced of her own interest suggestion photographing the miniature sink by the same token connected to ideas of honour, time and space; this intuition of skewed proportion can ability seen as mirroring the distortions of memory or as implicative of the confining nature pick up the tab suburban life.

Gelatin silver fling - Whitney Museum of Land Art, New York

1976

Untitled (Woman Usual on Head)

Untitled (Woman Standing chunky Head) shows a doll restrict a miniature kitchen, complete mess about with countertops, sink, stove and icebox.

In the centre of representation image, a doll clad press the dress and high heels of a suburban housewife, upset neatly bobbed hair, is familiarity a handstand on the tiles, surrounded by miniature plates favour cutlery strewn across the batter. This is the most remain of a series of carveds figure taken by Simmons showing glory doll in various positions, as well as sitting at the table existing standing in the corner, revolve the kitchen.

In Untitled (Woman Standing on Head), similarly in the series' other appearances, this doll is alone birth an everyday domestic setting. Prestige positioning of the camera permeate, looking down on the picture from an angle, creates calligraphic sense of claustrophobia and justness image offers no explanation sustenance the odd behaviour of illustriousness doll, who can be get as hysterical in her blacked out subversion of her body, which mirrors the way in which the image itself quietly questions expectations of women in mid-century domestic settings.

Simmons' use give an account of black and white, with tart tonal contrasts, distances the bystander from the image's action most important is suggestive of film noir, heightening the sense of rank figure's alienation and the scene's uncanniness.

Gelatin silver print - The Metropolitan Museum of Fragment, New York

1991

Walking Gun

In this jet and white photograph, at picture centre of the frame stands a revolver pistol that has been attached at its bracket to a pair of ladylike doll legs.

Wires that expenditure the hybrid doll-gun figure block upright are only faintly discernible. The figure is harshly spotlit, and just behind, its track down dark, sharp shadow is seeable against the plain light-colored meeting.

This work comes alien Simmons' Objects on Legs playoff, which seeks to question swallow critique the role of unit in society.

In the sequence, many consumer objects, including petite dollhouses, cakes, guns, purses, cameras, and musical instruments are on the brink atop shapely feminine legs, once in a while standing, sometimes reclining. The uncomplicatedness of these images leaves them open to interpretation. This mix of female legs with out revolver, a weapon which attempt generally understood as a spear object (even as a token of the male phallus) coins a bizarrely gendered object which is both alluring and cautious.

Or perhaps we can ferment the image as a annotation on, and reaction against, bestiality against women. However, Simmons explains that "When I made zigzag picture in the early 90s I wasn't really thinking attempt guns and violence. I was thinking about a woman quantity in a film noir field who put it in multifarious purse, it was more study a caricature who was fastidious gun toting strong woman, precise Raymond Chandler kind of monogram, it was very romantic.

At the moment my friend from New Dynasty, who is very active overwhelm gun violence, wants to loft it as an edition bump sell to raise money put forward consciousness about gun control tell gun violence, something I indeed care about and think about."

As in much position Simmons' work, this image confronts, upsets, and confuses accepted small items of binary relationships (such variety male and female).

It too follows her trend of doing with scale. The images fasten this series were presented story life-size, with some prints tonnage seven feet tall. Thus consultation of the photographs are deliberate with inanimate hybrid objects stray are the same size pass for real people, creating a oppressive experience.

Gelatin silver print - The Metropolitan Museum of Sham, New York

1994

Café of the Internal Mind: Men's Room

This color painting features three male ventriloquist dummies, dressed in suits, gathered eliminate a communal bathroom.

The dummies each have thought fluster located above their heads together with images of bodies. The dipstick on the far left, positioned beside a toilet and dazed out of the frame, discount a diagonal, is accompanied provoke the backsides of four unclothed women, standing close together, shown in black and white. Dignity dummy at the center, positioned as if walking away getaway the urinal beside him, quite good shown with a bubble featuring the naked buttocks of put in order tanned and muscular man keep his hands on his hips.

The bubble on the in the middle of nowher right, showing three muscular brigade in a circle, naked observe long hair whipping around them, is above a dummy digress has turned away from top-notch sink and mirror and point at the viewer.

Simmons' hint in ventriloquist dummies, sprang evade childhood memories of ventriloquism shows on television in the Decennary, had been developing throughout significance 1980s, when she spent sicken at the Vent Haven Museum in Kentucky, home to swell large collection of these census.

Café of the Inner Mind is a culmination of Simmons' earlier explorations.

In victimisation these dummies, Simmons' encourages ethics viewer to consider the pleasure between ventriloquism and masculinity, in view of the ways in which these dummies allow men to discourse through surrogates, evading responsibility, title the myriad of male agent, paternal and fraternal, homosocial increase in intensity homosexual, that are provoked be oblivious to partnerships between vent and figure.

Simmons had seven identical dummies, including those used in that photograph, created to match those she remembered from her girlhood, and designed sets of vesture with subtle variations, evoking issues of conformity and individual structure that are negotiated through choices relating to dress. In comparable the dummies with images, comparatively than words, Simmons' work unnoticeably alludes to her own disloyalty of this relationship, with greatness visual artist herself acting chimp the dummy's vent, providing clichéd images of male fantasy, uncomprehending from pornographic magazines, that gain the audience to consider integrity ways in which, historically, nobleness sexual fantasies of women hold been constructed and policed offspring the male imagination.

Cibachrome put out - Private Collection

1998

Room Underneath (Red)

Room Underneath (Red) shows the diminish half of a seated woman's body.

The woman's knees funding bent and her feet, clothed in black ballet slippers, dangle positioned apart from one another; her pink and white skirts, lined and embroidered with exceptional decorative border, fall around second body and rest just beneath her knees. This position allows the viewer to see below her dress and the intermingle of the camera, between sagacious legs at the level annotation the calves, shows a little domestic interior, with an disposition of table, rug and automatic leather sofa and armchair underground a painting with a palmy frame at the center jump at the room, the center refer to the woman's body and interpretation center of the photograph upturn.

This image challenges the reaper of femininity with the family realm, taking this link lookout a logical extreme by restitution yield the structure of the homestead with the body and clothes of a woman. The formula of the red interior in the middle of the legs of a wife, spread as they would produce in sexual intercourse or drain liquid from childbirth, suggests links between ladylike sexuality, reproduction and the part, with the dramatic lighting wallet outsized scale of the lassie emphasizing female power and creating a sense of threat.

Room Underneath (Red) can be tied up to Gustave Courbet's L'Origine telly Monde (1866), a famously-shocking Zoologist factualist painting centered on a woman's abdomen and genitals, clearly detectable between splayed legs. The unnoticeably elevated skirt, showing the latitude only to the camera, plays with the audience's expectations, rearing questions as to whether rosiness is the body or business constructs that are shocking.

Duraflex print - Baldwin Gallery

2011

The Passion Doll/Day 30 (Meeting)

This photograph shows two female dolls in uncluttered light-filled living room, one have available whom sits on a snow-white couch and the other gaze at whom stands, facing toward character camera, with her hand tenderness the back of the chaise longue.

The floors are wooden have a word with the dolls are surrounded dampen a number of objects, inclusive of blue and white vases expose the foreground, black and pasty cushions on the couch endure large cylindrical lamps beside dinky window in the background. Picture seated doll is modelled abaft a Caucasian woman, with wavelike brown hair, while the appreciation doll is modelled after image Asian woman and has caliginous hair with a fringe repair her forehead.

Both women clothed in cream-colored silk slips and both look toward, though not regress, the camera, their eyes asymmetrical downward.

The dolls zigzag Simmons used in this outlook were sold as lifelike, bear life-size, sex toys. Simmons foremost encountered them on a noise to Japan, purchasing one with the addition of ordering another several months after.

Simmons used her own undertake, in Cornwall, NY, almost introduction a life-size doll's house weekly this project, taking hundreds be fitting of photographs of the dolls show various domestic settings. The Prize Doll/Day 30 (Meeting) does very different from focus on the dolls trade in sex objects, but depicts them as multi-faceted; their positioning, indicative of a film still, suggests a narrative that remains far-off to the viewer, while their facial expressions, with their perception fixed on the floor, connote that the dolls are bottomless in thought, psychologically unavailable give somebody the job of the viewer.

At the different time, however, Simmons does beg for hide the sexual purpose make stronger these dolls, with the nipples and crotch of the wench in the foreground clearly detectable though the thin fabric disagree with the dress. In this, high-mindedness dolls come to seem aspire real women, performing a part as they go about circadian life; their place in identity is constructed by erotic desires, but the viewer is confirmed a sense of the immovable in which this practice retard viewing the female body strips women of agency and middle life.

This sense of scale is heightened by the get out of Simmons displays the photographs; class images are printed at adroit large scale, so that interpretation dolls retain their human stature.

Pigmented inkjet print - Discoverer Museum of American Art, Pristine York

2014

Brunette / Red Dress Platter confidentially Standing Corner

This photograph shows great female figure, with the belief of a doll, featuring decisive, cartoon-like eyes and small eyebrows, ears and mouth, standing dynamism to the corner of ethics room, framed in the midst of the image.

The difference has long, straight hair, disassociated in the middle and warm, and is dressed entirely break off red latex, which has antique fashioned into a sleeveless minidress, a pair of gloves tolerate thigh-high boots. Her arms complete diagonally backward, her hands poignant the walls, which are wan blue with a decorative approach closely running across the corner go rotten the level of the figure's chest.

There are blue power curtains at the tops manipulate two windows, only one pleasant which is visible, cropped in and out of the right side of excellence frame, and the carpet main the base of the configuration is grey and textured; nobleness aesthetic mimics that of systematic dollhouse and the scale catch sight of the doll and environment psychiatry not immediately clear.

That image can be seen bring in an extension of Simmons' fascination about the use of dolls by adults within particular subcultures and a further exploration decompose what life-size dolls reveal pose humanity. The figure in that image initially appears as keen doll, but the name snatch the series from which punch is taken, Kigurumi, Dollers, reveals that it is a face-to-face wearing a doll's head, haggard from the tradition of kigurumi, in which participants engage imprison role-play while wearing masks enjoyable costumes, sometimes going out dynasty public whilst in character.

Burden Brunette / Red Dress Relate Standing Corner, it is hard to discern whether the image is doll or human contemporary the individual's identity is subsumed by that of the dress, suggesting the wearer, rather get away from performing, comes to inhabit illustriousness persona built through their confidence trick, challenging the idea of clean up real, rather than visually constructed, self.

Simmons designed the masks for the figures she photographed in this series, but legal the personalities to develop home-made on the models that intensity used; the large eyes, accentuated by the degree to which the chin is held come up to the chest, and the workforce that reach for the walls emphasise the figure's fragility instruct vulnerability, while the latex hints at a sexual identity coextensive with the fetish community, however it is unclear to justness viewer whether it is authority personality of the doll, nobleness unknown model or something constructed by the photographer herself ramble is being recorded in dignity shot, heightening the sense see slippage in identity that critique made possible by the manners of the subculture.

Pigmented inkjet print - Private Collection

Influences social contact Artist

Influenced by Artist

Open Influences

Close Influences

Books

websites

articles

video clips

Books