In 1976, Laurie Simmons began constructing tiny rooms, staging them with dollhouse furniture, and photographing them in a way that could render them believable as life-size interiors; she was excited about the idea that a photograph could lie. In the five decades that followed, she has continued to excavate new ideas about reality, artifice, mass culture, gender roles, and the domestic in photography, video, and sculptures that employ dollhouses, dolls, ventriloquist dummies, humans who look like dolls, and, most recently, AI. In this compact show, Simmons pillages from her own props department, borrowing furniture and set pieces from previous projects to fill five white wooden boxes, confounding the idea of a diorama by playfully subverting expectations of scale, perspective, and material within a single work. Four suburban domestic settings contrast with the fifth, a murky river navigated by G.I. Joe-armed watercraft. In person, the pieces are obvious contrivances; in my iPhone photos, they’re more difficult to disbelieve — perhaps we are now a part of the (digital) pictures generation. —NW
