Artist Talk: Laurie Simmons

Wednesday, September 20, 2016
Presented by the Society for Contemporary Art and Sustaining Fellows

The artist Laurie Simmons gave a lecture about her influences, source material, and photographic work from the late 1970s to the present. For decades, Simmons has staged playful yet unsettling photographs of human surrogates populating a dollhouse world rife with longing, regret, and identity crises. Using paper dolls, finger puppets, ventriloquist dummies, and love dolls, Simmons poses “living objects” within domestic settings, creating a range of uncanny and humanizing effects, formal and symbolic roles, and unexpected depths of desire and artifice. For her series Walking and Lying Objects (1987–1991), Simmons hybridized human and doll legs with items including hourglasses, handbags, toilets, cameras, guns, and candy. With their objectification of both commercial products and the human body, these photographs recall advertising with additional layers of fantasy and alienation.

Видео Artist Talk: Laurie Simmons канала The Art Institute of Chicago