An American photographer and filmmaker, Laurie Simmons is associated with the Pictures Generation group of artists, and best known for her images of dollhouses, puppets, and dummies.
Born in 1949 in Long Island, NY, Simmons graduated from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1971, and moved to New York in 1973. She currently lives and works in New York with her husband, painter Carroll Dunham. She exhibited widely, including venues such as Artists Space, New York, NY; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Metro Pictures Gallery, New York, NY; and Jewish Museum, New York; among others. Her work is in a number of permanent collections, including Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington DC), Hara Museum (Tokyo), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA), Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum of Art and Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam).
In her early works, Simmons depicted dollhouses that evoke Dutch paintings of interiors and the advertisements found in 1950s housekeeping magazines. Throughout her practice, she has been challenging the veracity of photographic realism and the stereotypes of American culture. Continually working with dolls, puppets, and ventriloquist dummies, she endows them with a very human sense of longing and loneliness.
Featured image: Laurie Simmons – Untitled, 1999 (detail). 29 67/100 × 22 in. 75.4 × 55.9 cm. Photo courtesy Kavi Gupta Gallery
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