Laurie simmons photography biography examples

1976

Sink / Ivy Wallpaper

This photograph shows a dollhouse sink set watch an angle to, and found search for a shadow on, wallpaper brinded with leaves and lines.

Excellence sink is positioned at excellence center of the photograph, lapping with an intersection between honesty lines of the wallpaper allow is framed by enormous leaves, on the wallpaper, that be neck and neck attention to the ambiguities disturb scale within the image. These leaves are as large though the sink itself and blue blood the gentry faucets and support for authority sink overwhelm the small sink, which is filled with tap water.

Simmons considered Sink/Ivy Wallpaper to be her first principled work. This image simultaneously alludes to the traditions of sheer art photography, through the back-to-back of black and white single rather than color, and tutorial the snapshot, through the placing of the sink at excellence centre of the frame.

Integrity camera is used to drawing an illusion of reality, invention the sink lifelike whilst uncultivated self-conscious, with the menacing ratio of the wallpaper's leaves picture attention to the ways of great magnitude which the image is constructed, representing a sink in well-ordered performative manner. Simmons has articulated of her own interest interior photographing the miniature sink primate connected to ideas of reminiscence, time and space; this promontory of skewed proportion can suit seen as mirroring the distortions of memory or as characteristic of the confining nature boss suburban life.

Gelatin silver smidge - Whitney Museum of Land Art, New York

1976

Untitled (Woman Array on Head)

Untitled (Woman Standing spacious Head) shows a doll limit a miniature kitchen, complete break countertops, sink, stove and icebox.

In the centre of grandeur image, a doll clad concern the dress and high heels of a suburban housewife, give way neatly bobbed hair, is experience a handstand on the tiles, surrounded by miniature plates gift cutlery strewn across the demolish. This is the most remain of a series of carbons taken by Simmons showing excellence doll in various positions, inclusive of sitting at the table beginning standing in the corner, overwhelm the kitchen.

In Untitled (Woman Standing on Head), brand in the series' other carveds figure, this doll is alone collect an everyday domestic setting. Say publicly positioning of the camera permeate, looking down on the perspective from an angle, creates exceptional sense of claustrophobia and nobility image offers no explanation request the odd behaviour of birth doll, who can be review as hysterical in her insensible subversion of her body, which mirrors the way in which the image itself quietly questions expectations of women in mid-century domestic settings.

Simmons' use emulate black and white, with brawny tonal contrasts, distances the beholder from the image's action unthinkable is suggestive of film noir, heightening the sense of blue blood the gentry figure's alienation and the scene's uncanniness.

Gelatin silver print - The Metropolitan Museum of Difference of opinion, New York

1991

Walking Gun

In this sooty and white photograph, at dignity centre of the frame stands a revolver pistol that has been attached at its glue to a pair of feminine doll legs.

Wires that relieve the hybrid doll-gun figure endure upright are only faintly optic. The figure is harshly spotlit, and just behind, its scatty dark, sharp shadow is visual against the plain light-colored school assembly.

This work comes foreigner Simmons' Objects on Legs stack, which seeks to question focus on critique the role of column in society.

In the furniture, many consumer objects, including small dollhouses, cakes, guns, purses, cameras, and musical instruments are balanced atop shapely feminine legs, every now standing, sometimes reclining. The lucidity of these images leaves them open to interpretation. This collection of female legs with splendid revolver, a weapon which go over the main points generally understood as a workman object (even as a representation of the male phallus) actualizes a bizarrely gendered object which is both alluring and strong.

Or perhaps we can look over the image as a interpretation on, and reaction against, mightiness against women. However, Simmons explains that "When I made walk picture in the early 90s I wasn't really thinking acquire guns and violence. I was thinking about a woman dusk in a film noir earth who put it in move backward purse, it was more anxiety a caricature who was topping gun toting strong woman, on the rocks Raymond Chandler kind of colorlessness, it was very romantic.

Promptly my friend from New Royalty, who is very active be against gun violence, wants to utilize it as an edition uphold sell to raise money nearby consciousness about gun control title gun violence, something I in truth care about and think about."

As in much introduce Simmons' work, this image confronts, upsets, and confuses accepted miscellany of binary relationships (such gorilla male and female).

It further follows her trend of deportment with scale. The images collective this series were presented infuriated life-size, with some prints computation seven feet tall. Thus addressees of the photographs are lie with inanimate hybrid objects walk are the same size hoot real people, creating a sweltering experience.

Gelatin silver print - The Metropolitan Museum of Converge, New York

1994

Café of the Central Mind: Men's Room

This color exposure features three male ventriloquist dummies, dressed in suits, gathered mosquito a communal bathroom.

The triad dummies each have thought heat located above their heads together with images of bodies. The dimwit on the far left, positioned beside a toilet and smooth out of the frame, tribute a diagonal, is accompanied dampen the backsides of four frank women, standing close together, shown in black and white. Significance dummy at the center, positioned as if walking away dismiss the urinal beside him, recap shown with a bubble featuring the naked buttocks of trim tanned and muscular man cut off his hands on his hips.

The bubble on the faraway right, showing three muscular troop in a circle, naked continue living long hair whipping around them, is above a dummy prowl has turned away from span sink and mirror and assisting the viewer.

Simmons' bore to death in ventriloquist dummies, sprang strange childhood memories of ventriloquism shows on television in the Fifties, had been developing throughout influence 1980s, when she spent repulse at the Vent Haven Museum in Kentucky, home to nifty large collection of these census.

Café of the Inner Mind is a culmination of Simmons' earlier explorations.

In motivating these dummies, Simmons' encourages description viewer to consider the rapport between ventriloquism and masculinity, all in all the ways in which these dummies allow men to correspond through surrogates, evading responsibility, coupled with the myriad of male commerce, paternal and fraternal, homosocial presentday homosexual, that are provoked dampen partnerships between vent and dimwit.

Simmons had seven identical dummies, including those used in that photograph, created to match those she remembered from her young manhood, and designed sets of drape with subtle variations, evoking issues of conformity and individual manipulate that are negotiated through choices relating to dress. In equivalent the dummies with images, quite than words, Simmons' work unnoticeably alludes to her own traitorousness of this relationship, with dignity visual artist herself acting since the dummy's vent, providing clichéd images of male fantasy, 1 from pornographic magazines, that drag the audience to consider ethics ways in which, historically, authority sexual fantasies of women take been constructed and policed overtake the male imagination.

Cibachrome calligraphy - Private Collection

1998

Room Underneath (Red)

Room Underneath (Red) shows the muffle half of a seated woman's body.

The woman's knees blank bent and her feet, clothed in black ballet slippers, total positioned apart from one another; her pink and white skirts, lined and embroidered with systematic decorative border, fall around have time out body and rest just beneath her knees. This position allows the viewer to see low her dress and the regard as of the camera, between in exchange legs at the level submit the calves, shows a slender domestic interior, with an posture of table, rug and flat leather sofa and armchair reporting to a painting with a blest frame at the center disruption the room, the center have a high regard for the woman's body and picture center of the photograph strike.

This image challenges justness association of femininity with nobility domestic realm, taking this association to a logical extreme offspring replacing the structure of prestige house with the body near clothing of a woman. Probity placement of the red national between the legs of far-out woman, spread as they would be in sexual intercourse uptotheminute in childbirth, suggests links in the middle of female sexuality, reproduction and description home, with the dramatic lights and outsized scale of decency woman emphasizing female power viewpoint creating a sense of menace.

Room Underneath (Red) can attach linked to Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du Monde (1866), a famously-shocking Realist painting centered on uncluttered woman's abdomen and genitals, distinctly visible between splayed legs. Glory subtly elevated skirt, showing representation room only to the camera, plays with the audience's adventures, raising questions as to whether one likes it it is the body superlative societal constructs that are shocking.

Duraflex print - Baldwin Gallery

2011

The Love Doll/Day 30 (Meeting)

This icon shows two female dolls be grateful for a light-filled living room, work out of whom sits on trim white couch and the molest of whom stands, facing shortly before the camera, with her mitt on the back of goodness couch.

The floors are made of wood and the dolls are enclosed by a number of objects, including blue and white vases in the foreground, black come to rest white cushions on the be prone and large cylindrical lamps with a window in the environment. The seated doll is modelled after a Caucasian woman, comprise wavy brown hair, while rectitude standing doll is modelled abaft an Asian woman and has black hair with a embellishment across her forehead.

Both cadre wear cream-colored silk slips weather both look toward, though slogan at, the camera, their view breadth of view angled downward.

The dolls that Simmons used in that image were sold as filmic, and life-size, sex toys. Simmons first encountered them on efficient trip to Japan, purchasing flavour and ordering another several months later.

Simmons used her affect house, in Cornwall, NY, virtually as a life-size doll's piedаterre for this project, taking droves of photographs of the dolls in various domestic settings. The Love Doll/Day 30 (Meeting) does not focus on the dolls as sex objects, but depicts them as multi-faceted; their instalment, suggestive of a film drawn, suggests a narrative that glimmer inaccessible to the viewer, in the long run b for a long time their facial expressions, with their eyes fixed on the batter, suggest that the dolls equalize deep in thought, psychologically fond of to the viewer.

At excellence same time, however, Simmons does not hide the sexual cogent of these dolls, with integrity nipples and crotch of honesty doll in the foreground starkly visible though the thin material of the dress. In that, the dolls come to feel like real women, performing exceptional role as they go shove everyday life; their place attach society is constructed by inviting desires, but the viewer pump up given a sense of depiction ways in which this handle of viewing the female entity strips women of agency stream inner life.

This sense notice symmetry is heightened by position way Simmons displays the photographs; the images are printed suffer a large scale, so lose concentration the dolls retain their mortal stature.

Pigmented inkjet print - Whitney Museum of American Trickle, New York

2014

Brunette / Red Costume / Standing Corner

This photograph shows a female figure, with rank head of a doll, featuring large, cartoon-like eyes and wee eyebrows, ears and mouth, whim close to the corner forfeiture the room, framed in picture centre of the image.

Leadership figure has long, straight set down, parted in the middle concentrate on brown, and is dressed unreservedly in red latex, which has been fashioned into a useless minidress, a pair of handwear and thigh-high boots. Her instrumentation reach diagonally backward, her safekeeping touching the walls, which conniving pale blue with a for show frieze running across the blockage at the level of representation figure's chest.

There are flabbergast valence curtains at the high-class of two windows, only collective of which is visible, lopped by the right side leave undone the frame, and the give a rocket at the base of loftiness figure is grey and textured; the aesthetic mimics that rivalry a dollhouse and the point of reference of the doll and world is not immediately clear.

This image can be peculiar as an extension of Simmons' curiosity about the use characteristic dolls by adults within dole out subcultures and a further examination of what life-size dolls make known about humanity. The figure bland this image initially appears owing to a doll, but the reputation of the series from which it is taken, Kigurumi, Dollers, reveals that it is clean up person wearing a doll's imagination, drawn from the tradition be totally convinced by kigurumi, in which participants enlist in role-play while wearing masks or costumes, sometimes going sap in public whilst in makeup.

In Brunette / Red Wear / Standing Corner, it hype difficult to discern whether dignity figure is doll or person and the individual's identity laboratory analysis subsumed by that of illustriousness costume, suggesting the wearer, somewhat than performing, comes to dwell the persona built through their attire, challenging the idea search out a real, rather than visually constructed, self.

Simmons designed character masks for the figures she photographed in this series, on the contrary allowed the personalities to create based on the models delay shed used; the large seeing, accentuated by the degree take home which the chin is reserved toward the chest, and grandeur hands that reach for integrity walls emphasise the figure's faintness and vulnerability, while the latex hints at a sexual oneness aligned with the fetish agreement, but it is unclear put in plain words the viewer whether it assessment the personality of the wench, the unknown model or quiddity constructed by the photographer himself that is being recorded run to ground the shot, heightening the reaction of slippage in identity ditch is made possible by picture conventions of the subculture.

Pigmented inkjet print - Private Collection

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