The Music of Regret, 1994
In her photographic series The Music of Regret, 1994, Simmons examines the path not taken—a common theme in movies. Regret is a driving force in these works, but it is also a theme that permeates much of Simmons’s imagery, beginning with her earliest depictions of the Jane doll, who fails to find idyllic domesticity. The artist had a doll made in her own likeness for this body of work. “This series was the first time I twinned myself, and then I used my doll to explore couples and love for the first time.” Using her twin doll and six male ventriloquist suitors, she created photographs that appear to be cinematic vignettes and in fact would become a springboard for her film by the same title a little over a decade later, in 2006, with the actress Meryl Streep playing the role of Simmons.
“It’s like a memory of a perfect childhood that you never had, couldn’t have had. The Music of Regret is about examining a type of perfection, which is a kind of regret because it’s unattainable. It’s something my mother always had—wishing that she had done this or that. My mother’s feeling of ‘would have, should have, could have’ became the basis for the lyrics of the song “Woulda, Shoulda, Coulda” in the film version of The Music of Regret. This remorse that comes with regret is also part of my work,” Simmons says. Regret in this way becomes another emotion beside love, hate, or jealousy, which are also implied in these images.