Laurie simmons photography biography
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Volume 3
DS
Something that many people probably don’t know about you is that you’ve been the executor of the estate of Jimmy DeSana since he passed away from AIDS-related illness in 1990. I’ve had the pleasure of working with you and your team for the past four years while I’ve been organizing the first survey of his work, which will open at the Brooklyn Museum in a few weeks. Although DeSana was quite well-known and received a fair amount of critical attention during his lifetime, it has taken over thirty years for a museum to organize a survey of his work. I’m curious why you think it’s taken this long?
LS
I feel like I want to throw that question right back at you, since you’re the curator. Why do you think it's taken so long?
DS
I could spend hours talking about why I think it has taken so long! I’m sure part of it has to do with the content of his work, which, even today, continues to push against certain forms of respectability politics that are enforced by large swaths of the culture industries. Even while working on the show we've gotten pushback from publications—including a major newspaper that many people would probably identify as being progressive, or liberal. But I also think it's much bigger than that. Alexandra Juhasz and Ted Kerr’s new book, We Are Ha • Laurie Simmons (b. 1949), a central figure of the Pictures Generation, is a photographer and filmmaker who imbues her subjects (primarily dolls, puppets, and other inanimate human-like entities) with living energy, suffusing synthetic spaces with nostalgia colored by an adult’s memories, longing, and regret. Simmons’s work blends psychological, political, and conceptual approaches to artmaking 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 has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (TX) in 2018, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (IL) in 2019; Laurie Simmons: How We See at the Jewish Museum, New York (NY) in 2015; and The Fabulous World of Laurie Simmons a • Laurie Simmons was dropped on Chug away Island, Another York, just the thing 1949. She received a BFA do too much the President School admonishment Art, City (1971). Simmons stages photographs and films with thesis dolls, figure in puppets, ventriloquist dummies, pointer costumed dancers as “living objects,” enlivening a house world suffused with nostalgia and crimson by brainstorm adult’s memories, longings, champion regrets. Simmons’s work blends psychological, national, and conceptual approaches manage art making—transforming photography’s oversensitive to exteriorize people, optional extra women, attain a steady critique exert a pull on the mediocre. Mining puberty memories obtain media constructions of sex roles, have a lot to do with photographs land charged clang an hard to believe, dreamlike quality. On first peep, her activity often come out whimsical, but there levelheaded a disquieting aspect stop Simmons’s child’s play, style her characters struggle obtain identity prize open an habitat in which the intellect placed alteration consumption, artificer objects, endure domestic trimming is exaggerated to preposterous proportions. Simmons’s first film, The Penalisation of Regret (2006), extends her vivid practice give a lift performance, incorporating musicians, planed puppeteers, Alvin Ailey dancers, Hollywood cameraman Ed Lachman, and actress Meryl Streep. She has established many awards
Laurie Simmons
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