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Laurie Simmons
Talking Objects
Laurie Simmons

Laurie Simmons. Jane, 1988
The career of American photographer and filmmaker Laurie Simmons is among the defining hallmarks of the Pictures Generation, a wave of artists who emerged in the 70s and 80s to open critical dialogues on the influence of images themselves, their deeper politics, and their roles in shaping cultural norms.
This cohort, which included Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Robert Heinecken, among others, might be considered the first to be considered as not photographers, but artists working with photography. And in broad strokes the motivations of the Pictures Generation were to cut through the surfaces of romance and beauty in photography by adopting strategies that helped to reveal the dark underbellies of popular images.
Simmons’ legacy during this period is broadly recognized for her use of dolls, toys, puppets, and other objects that recall upbringing in American suburbia. Through these subjects, the artist injects subversive commentary beneath their typical superficialities. In Talking Objects (1987-1989), Simmons employs ventriloquist dolls, disquieting subjects designed to entertain, but which encompass deeper and more sinister suggestions of power, control, and the subjugation of agency.
Throughout the reading of Talking Objects, we find that Simmons not only embraces but further exaggerates the anthropomorphic features of these objects. Through dramatized, theatrical lighting and suggestions for formal portraiture, the artist pushes the absurdity beyond the boundaries of realistic expectation, providing viewers the opportunity to draw insights from the wreckage of believability. And what might these insights consist of? The prevalence of artifice within hyper-saturated media conditions, the reflections of truths that are buried beneath such pretense, and, perhaps most significantly, our own human difficulties in being able to discern which is which.
Selected Works
Laurie Simmons
The Frenchman (Mickey), 1987
4 ETH
Laurie Simmons
Talking Mitt, 1987
4 ETH
Laurie Simmons
Jane, 1988
4 ETH
Laurie Simmons
Talking Baseball Bat, 1989
5 ETH
Laurie Simmons
Doug and Eddy, 1988
4 ETH
Laurie Simmons
Izzy, 1988
4 ETH
Full Collection
Artist
Laurie Simmons
1949 (USA)
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Laurie Simmons is a photographer and filmmaker based in New York. She received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia (1971).
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, as 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. Simmons’s first film, The Music of Regret (2006), extends her photographic practice to performance, incorporating musicians, professional puppeteers, Alvin Ailey dancers, Hollywood cinematographer Ed Lachman, and actress Meryl Streep.
She has received many awards, including the Roy Lichtenstein Residency in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome (2005); and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1997) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1984). She has had major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Baltimore Museum of Art (1997); San Jose Museum of Art, California (1990); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1987); and she has participated in two Whitney Biennial exhibitions (1985, 1991).
Press + Articles
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01
A Doll’s House
The New Yorker (article)
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02
Laurie Simmons Would Love to live in a New York Department Store
Curbed Magazine (article)