Laurie Simmons

“I have one word for you Ben—PLASTICS—There’s a great future in plastics” — The Graduate, 1967

In an oft quoted line from Mike Nichols’ 1967 coming of age film The Graduate, Ben Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman) is directed by a well-meaning adult towards a bright future in plastics. While the first Bakelite appeared in the early 1900’s, plastic was considered a modern material and an essential product of the utopian future envisioned in post-World War II America. In contemporary times, growing concerns about waste and the environment have degraded plastic’s reputation. It is no longer the material of the future, but rather that which is fake, cheap, disposable, and now toxic.

In Laurie Simmons’ third solo exhibition at Salon 94 titled 2017: The Mess and Some New, plastic takes center stage, becoming the subject of a new monumental photograph—a portrait or momento mori of our times. Throughout her nearly forty-year career, Simmons’ subjects have often been constructed from plastic. She has placed inanimate dolls, ventriloquist dummies, and household objects and furnishings in intricately staged sets with theatrical lighting with the reverence typically reserved for precious materials or human subjects.

In 2017: The Mess, Simmons focuses her camera on a twenty-foot rainbow gradient of household objects, tools, foodstuffs, and knick-knacks dumped, rather than artfully arranged, on the studio floor. Disorientation guides the panoramic image: at first glance, it is impossible to discern the difference between a blue Gatorade bottle and a container of Windex, orange surface cleaner and a bottle of SunnyD. The same acid green color that is used in sodas, also appears in mouth wash and shampoo. Simmons organizes these objects, containers, and edibles by shade and hue, continuing her investigation of taking inventory: making piles and crowding the picture plane to deemphasize the importance of any one object (previously explored in The Instant Decorator, 2001-4). It also furthers her examination of color coordination and coding (Color Coordinated Interiors, 1983, Tourism, 1984, and Color Pictures, 2007).

A drone video of the arrangement—both the aerial-view and an immersive journey through the objects—will be playing on Salon 94 Bowery’s video wall to accompany the monumental photograph. The video allows the viewer to experience the work like a miniature tourist in a colossal forest of junk.

Recently, Simmons has placed herself in the position of a portrait photographer, using a camera on a tripod to shoot seated subjects. The works included in Some New are a natural continuation of Simmons series How We See (2014-15), which portrayed fashion models with hand-painted eyes covering their closed lids. In her new portraits, Simmons chose to shoot friends and family in a state of change or renewal. A personal counterpoint to 2017: The Mess, the artist plays with the constructs of portraiture by substituting one aspect of the sitter’s identity with a painted replacement. In Some New: Hannah (Aqua), jeans and a t-shirt have been painted with a tromp l’oeil effect. In Some New: Shirin (Yellow) and Some New: Andrianna (Red), precious jeweled necklaces are painted directly on their chests. In Some New: Lena (Pink) and Some New: Grace (Orange), the subjects picked their own painted identities: Audrey Hepburn and Rudolph Valentino. Some New is Simmons first real engagement with portraiture, in which she allows human subjects to enter her carefully crafted world of plastic interaction.

Born in 1949 on Long Island, New York, Laurie Simmons received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia in 1971. A major solo retrospective titled Big Camera/Little Camera is forthcoming at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, where it is curated by Andrea Karnes, senior curator and will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, curated by Omar Kholeif, Manilow Senior Curator and Director of Global Initiatives. A major scholarly catalogue, co-published by the Modern in Fort Worth and DelMonico Books·Prestel, will accompany the exhibition. She has held major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Baltimore Museum of Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Neues Museum, Nuremberg Germany, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden; and the Jewish Museum, New York. She has participated in two Whitney Biennial exhibitions (1985, 1991) and was included in the 2013 Venice Biennial. Simmons is the recipient of the Roy Lichtenstein Residency in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome (2005); and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1997) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1984). She lives and works in New York and Kent, Connecticut.

One work from the exhibition—Some New: Payton for Harper’s Bazaar (Pink)—is from an upcoming (June/July) fashion editorial commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar Magazine. Pushing the boundaries of her How We See series, Simmons collaborated with makeup artist Nick Barose to create human- anime hybrids dressed from head down in couture.

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The Mess and Some New

“After several years of working with lifelike latex dolls, (

) I finally became comfortable working in a human scale environment. As I searched for my next subject I stumbled upon a sub-genre of Japanese cosplay called Kigurumi. Cosplay, short for “costume play,” is a performance art in which participants wear costumes to represent a specific character or idea and often interact in groups to create a subculture based on role-play.

This subset includes doll-like characters who dress up in Kigurumi masks and bodysuits. (The bodysuit is known in Japan as a ‘zentai’ or skin suit – a spandex “onesie’ that covers the whole body including the face, hands and feet.) Also known as “Dollers” or “Kiggers,” they go out publicly in their costumes, sometimes as paid entertainers at public events but more often to just “be” in their characters. Dollers frequently flip gender – with men dressed as females though there are girl Dollers and girls dressed as boys, stuffed animals and cartoon characters.

Dollers can become closely bonded with their Kigurumi identities and often feel more at home in their costume personas than their “real” selves. It can be difficult to see out of the masks’ eyeholes so the characters are sometimes led around by the hand making them seem even more fragile and vulnerable.

I searched the web for Kigurumi mask makers and the faces that appealed to me the most come from a cosplayer in Russia. I’ve created a group of characters based on his masks. I’ve dressed them, posed them, dyed their hair and let them develop personalities, gestures and tics based on the models who inhabit them. I perceive them as making an effort to reveal themselves to me and that is what I’ve been trying to record.

Some of my cosplayers are men and some are women but they all portray female characters. I try to explore the psychological subtexts of beauty, identity and persona surrounding the assembled Dollers. At first I dressed them only in fetish latex, which seemed both doll-like and right for their identities, but it soon became clear that they needed to expand their repertoire and play dress up.

While working with my characters I started to think about the implications of using a mask to alter one’s persona as well as my growing affection – even preference – for the masked performer. Might masking be at least part of the appeal of contemporary forms of imaging and presentation of the self via social media? In the last decade the boundaries separating identity and persona have become increasingly blurred — as individuals ‘present’ their BEST selves to their Twitter, Facebook and Instagram followers. One tilt of the iphone can make the difference between a glamorous, funny or obscene selfie. I wonder about the fuzzy space between who “we” are to ourselves and the “we” that is invented, constructed and expressed using the readily available tools of the 21st century? Aren’t we all playing dress-up in some part of our lives?

The first two photos from a new series titled How We See also steal from an anime convention of painting real eyes on closed eyelids. Two fashion models (a blonde and a red head) were made up to resemble ‘Doll Girls’ – young women who surgically enhance themselves to look like Barbies. Like the Mona Lisa their painted on gaze appears to follow you wherever you move. All of the characters in Kigurumi, Dollers and How We See have been photographed in a tiny abandoned brick house in Connecticut. The family that lived there painted the rooms exotic colors and made little drawings on the wall, creating a space that feels like an overgrown version of the dollhouses I’ve used in the past.

Most importantly the Kigurumi masks allow me to work with human players to explore the blurry place between human and doll, animate and inanimate. I recently read a quote from a Kigger who said ‘I like the idea of existing somewhere between the 2-D and 3-D worlds.’ I think that has always appealed to me as well.”

Kigurumi, Dollers and How We See

“When I picked up a camera with a group of other women, I’m not going to say it was a radical act, but we were certainly doing it in some sort of defiance of, or reaction to, a male-dominated world of painting.”

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Laurie Simmons (Born–2024)

Exhibitions