Laurie Simmons
20 Apr - 25 May 2013
LAURIE SIMMONS
The Love Doll: Days 9-35
20 April - 25 May 2013
Laurie Simmons is known for her photographs and films using human surrogates like puppets, toys, dolls, and magazine cut-outs, among other props. A brief narrative summary of her photographic bodies of work includes the following: “Early Color Interiors”(1978-79), where vintage dolls resembling housewives are set in 50’s interior decor;“Tourism”(1983-84), where the dolls are found sightseeing at the Eiffel Tower or a casino in Las Vegas; “Talking Objects”(1987-89) and“Walking and Lying Objects”(1987-91), which are portraits of hybrids of dolls’legs topped with the body of an object like a cake, a gun, or a house; and “The Boxes (Ardis Vinklers)”(2005) where dolls are actors set up in mid-performance of a play on a stage.
Simmons has long investigated human performance as it relates to specific environments through a deep documentation and profound choreography of dolls and objects in and on a stage. The boundaries between fiction and reality are often blurred, and the artist’s tableaus are evocative of a sincere humanity, emotion and character. The critic Kate Linker remarked that Simmons is placed in a generation of artists who came out of the mid 70's and approached photography as a conceptual medium. She also points out:“These artists — Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger, and Sarah Charlesworth among them — inherited the photo-based conceptual practices of Ed Ruscha, Jan Dibbets, and others and applied the radical new definition of photography as a medium of discourse to the examination of social and cultural representations.” (Kate Linker, Reflections on a Mirror, Laurie Simmons, Walking, Talking, Lying, 2005, p.8 Aperture Foundation). Linker has also stated that“Simmons' work is a deceptively simple response to a complex transformation in American culture centered on the increasing importance of objects.” (op. p.9).
In this exhibition, 14 works from Simmons’new body of photographs entitled “THE LOVE DOLL” will be paired with the artist’s new film “GEISHA SONG”. In 2009, Simmons discovered a poster advertising a plastic love doll dressed in a school girl’s uniform in a comic shop in Akihabara.“I had a strong sense I'd find something that would change my work and move it forward - a book, a prop, a background,”she said later (Laurie Simmons, The Love Doll, p.10). Simmons immediately ordered two of the customized, high-end and life-size Japanese Love Dolls. Originally intended as surrogate sex partners, the dolls arrived to her New York studio in a crate, clothed in a transparent slip and accompanied by a separate box containing an engagement ring and female genitalia. Simmons began to document her photographic relationship with this human-scale“girl”. The resulting photographs depict the lifelike, latex doll in an ongoing series of “actions”, shown and titled chronologically as the artist’s relationship with the prop evolves. Simmons selected clothes, accessories, props and settings for the dolls, taking various portraits of them in the living room and the kitchen, inside the pool and in the garden, among other domestic sites. She documents the figures in various moments, under changing light, and through all seasons. In the film, one of the love dolls is dressed and made-up traditionally as a Geisha, and seen in slow-moving and meticulous close-ups against the lilting melody of Marlene Dietrich’s “Falling in Love Again” sung in English with a Japanese accent.
The film can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RilTKShzT1E
The series has been published in the book“THE LOVE DOLL” and has been exhibited in New York, London, Paris and Aspen and Gothenburg Sweden. In a review of her solo exhibition at Salon 94 in New York in 2011, Jeffrey Kastner wrote:“Simmons has significantly raised the emotional stakes, opening up herself and her projects to far richer and less psychological terrain, and engineering a kind of ‘animation’ frequently missing from her more psychologically attenuated stagings.”(Jeffrey Kastner, ARTFORUM, May 2011)
This series will also be presented in the 10th anniversary exhibition“ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE: FROM CHAGALL TO KUSAMA AND HATSUNE MIKU”at Mori Art Museum (April 26 – September 1, 2013).
Laurie Simmons was born in Long Island, NY in 1949. She graduated from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia with B.F.A. in 1971 and lives and works in New York. Her works are collected in major institutions in the U.S. including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Walker Art Center, as well as The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Israel Museum, The National Museum of Art, Osaka and Hara Museum in Japan. She recently had a solo exhibition of her major works including the Love Doll series at Gothenburg Museum of Art in Sweden in 2012. This year she will participate in Venice Biennial with Allan McCollum, showing “Actual Photos” series in 1985.
She has extended the scope of the artistic practice to collaborations with fashion brands such as COMME des GARÇONS and Chanel.
The Love Doll: Days 9-35
20 April - 25 May 2013
Laurie Simmons is known for her photographs and films using human surrogates like puppets, toys, dolls, and magazine cut-outs, among other props. A brief narrative summary of her photographic bodies of work includes the following: “Early Color Interiors”(1978-79), where vintage dolls resembling housewives are set in 50’s interior decor;“Tourism”(1983-84), where the dolls are found sightseeing at the Eiffel Tower or a casino in Las Vegas; “Talking Objects”(1987-89) and“Walking and Lying Objects”(1987-91), which are portraits of hybrids of dolls’legs topped with the body of an object like a cake, a gun, or a house; and “The Boxes (Ardis Vinklers)”(2005) where dolls are actors set up in mid-performance of a play on a stage.
Simmons has long investigated human performance as it relates to specific environments through a deep documentation and profound choreography of dolls and objects in and on a stage. The boundaries between fiction and reality are often blurred, and the artist’s tableaus are evocative of a sincere humanity, emotion and character. The critic Kate Linker remarked that Simmons is placed in a generation of artists who came out of the mid 70's and approached photography as a conceptual medium. She also points out:“These artists — Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger, and Sarah Charlesworth among them — inherited the photo-based conceptual practices of Ed Ruscha, Jan Dibbets, and others and applied the radical new definition of photography as a medium of discourse to the examination of social and cultural representations.” (Kate Linker, Reflections on a Mirror, Laurie Simmons, Walking, Talking, Lying, 2005, p.8 Aperture Foundation). Linker has also stated that“Simmons' work is a deceptively simple response to a complex transformation in American culture centered on the increasing importance of objects.” (op. p.9).
In this exhibition, 14 works from Simmons’new body of photographs entitled “THE LOVE DOLL” will be paired with the artist’s new film “GEISHA SONG”. In 2009, Simmons discovered a poster advertising a plastic love doll dressed in a school girl’s uniform in a comic shop in Akihabara.“I had a strong sense I'd find something that would change my work and move it forward - a book, a prop, a background,”she said later (Laurie Simmons, The Love Doll, p.10). Simmons immediately ordered two of the customized, high-end and life-size Japanese Love Dolls. Originally intended as surrogate sex partners, the dolls arrived to her New York studio in a crate, clothed in a transparent slip and accompanied by a separate box containing an engagement ring and female genitalia. Simmons began to document her photographic relationship with this human-scale“girl”. The resulting photographs depict the lifelike, latex doll in an ongoing series of “actions”, shown and titled chronologically as the artist’s relationship with the prop evolves. Simmons selected clothes, accessories, props and settings for the dolls, taking various portraits of them in the living room and the kitchen, inside the pool and in the garden, among other domestic sites. She documents the figures in various moments, under changing light, and through all seasons. In the film, one of the love dolls is dressed and made-up traditionally as a Geisha, and seen in slow-moving and meticulous close-ups against the lilting melody of Marlene Dietrich’s “Falling in Love Again” sung in English with a Japanese accent.
The film can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RilTKShzT1E
The series has been published in the book“THE LOVE DOLL” and has been exhibited in New York, London, Paris and Aspen and Gothenburg Sweden. In a review of her solo exhibition at Salon 94 in New York in 2011, Jeffrey Kastner wrote:“Simmons has significantly raised the emotional stakes, opening up herself and her projects to far richer and less psychological terrain, and engineering a kind of ‘animation’ frequently missing from her more psychologically attenuated stagings.”(Jeffrey Kastner, ARTFORUM, May 2011)
This series will also be presented in the 10th anniversary exhibition“ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE: FROM CHAGALL TO KUSAMA AND HATSUNE MIKU”at Mori Art Museum (April 26 – September 1, 2013).
Laurie Simmons was born in Long Island, NY in 1949. She graduated from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia with B.F.A. in 1971 and lives and works in New York. Her works are collected in major institutions in the U.S. including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Walker Art Center, as well as The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Israel Museum, The National Museum of Art, Osaka and Hara Museum in Japan. She recently had a solo exhibition of her major works including the Love Doll series at Gothenburg Museum of Art in Sweden in 2012. This year she will participate in Venice Biennial with Allan McCollum, showing “Actual Photos” series in 1985.
She has extended the scope of the artistic practice to collaborations with fashion brands such as COMME des GARÇONS and Chanel.