About Laurie Simmons
Laurie Simmons is an American photographer and filmmaker. Art historians consider her a key figure of The Pictures Generation and a group of late-1970s women artists that emerged as a counterpoint to the male-dominated and formalist fields of painting and sculpture. The group introduced new approaches to photography, such as staged setups, narrative, and appropriations of pop culture and everyday objects that pushed the medium toward the center of contemporary art. Simmons's elaborately constructed images employ psychologically charged human proxies—dolls, ventriloquist dummies, mannequins, props, miniatures and interiors—and also depict people as dolls. Often noted for its humor and pathos, her art explores boundaries such as between artifice and truth or private and public, while raising questions about the construction of identity, tropes of prosperity, consumerism and domesticity, and practices of self-presentation and image-making. In a review of Simmons's 2019 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, critic Steve Johnson wrote, "Collectively—and with a sly but barbed sense of humor— challenge you to think about what, if anything, is real: in our gender roles, and our cultural assumptions, and our perceptions of others." Simmons created the Kaleidoscope House (2000–2) with architect Peter Wheelwright, an interactive, three-story modernist dollhouse sold in stores, which she later photographed. She created them by outfitting dolls with miniature, highly symbolic props—handbags, houses, perfume bottles, guns, pastries—that covered all but their slender legs (e.g., Walking House, 1989). In 2010, she created works using paper dolls created from images of models dressed in designer Peter Jensen's clothing, which she placed inside her signature dollhouse tableaus, then collaged and photographed.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.