About the Work
Simmons stages photographs and films with paper dolls, finger puppets, ventriloquist dummies and costumed dancers as “living objects,” animating a dollhouse world suffused with nostalgia and colored by an adult’s memories, longings and regrets.
About the Artist
Using dolls, dollhouses, dummies, and figures cut from magazines, Laurie Simmons constructs and photographs voyeuristic scenes of dreamlike distortions that challenge sensory perceptions. Working as a filmmaker, she made The Music of Regret, a mini-musical in three acts in 2006. It premiered at MoMA and featured musicians, professional puppeteers, Alvin Ailey dancers, and actress Meryl Streep. More recently, Simmons played a fictional mother in her daughter Lena Dunham's film Tiny Furniture. She has received numerous awards, including the Roy Lichtenstein Residency in Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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