April 2011
Laurie Simmons 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. Simmons's work blends psychological, political, and conceptual approaches to art-making, transforming photography's propensity to objectify people, especially women, into a sustained critique of the medium. Mining childhood memories and media constructions of gender roles, her photographs are charged with an eerie, dreamlike quality. On first glance her works often appear whimsical, but there is a disquieting aspect to Simmons's child's play: Her characters struggle over identity in an environment in which the value placed on consumption, designer objects, and domestic space is inflated to absurd proportions.
She has won numerous awards including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2007), and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1984) and has work in public collections around the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Whitney Musuem or American Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. She is currently represented by Salon 94.