Artist INTERVIEW

Laurie Simmons

Originally printed in Compass, July 11, 2018.

For decades in her carefully staged miniature sets, photographer Laurie Simmons has blended our sense of human and figurine, play and pathos, with the use of light, shadow and American iconography. The ballerina; the housewife; the cowboy; the dummy — the dolls loom large, not as toys but as the center of their own worlds. Lately, she’s placed the focus on living models and deriving inspiration from international forms of fantasy. Her work has been featured in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. She has acted in her daughter, Lena Dunham’s 2010 film “Tiny Furniture,” and in 2016 as director of her own film, “My Art” which will be screened this August 23 by Boondocks Film Society at Troutbeck in Amenia.

Last week Simmons spoke with Compass as she prepares for her upcoming lecture at Five Points Gallery in Torrington on Saturday evening, July 14.

Alexander Wilburn: What do you think the biggest misconception about your work is?

Laurie Simmons: I think it is that I am solely a feminist artist, which is the most limited interpretation of my work. Of course, I am a feminist. What would it mean to be a woman in this period of history and say, “No, I’m not a feminist?” But that’s not the only read of my work at all. In order to get out of my studio, my work has to have a richer, more complex meaning for me.

AW: You recently brought out a series from the early ‘90s, “Clothes Make The Man,” for Mary Boone Gallery. Was it accepted differently in the current zeitgeist?

LS: It originally premiered with a big thunk. At the time that I showed it, I felt it was very misunderstood. In 1994, giving male characters their fantasies was kind of dismissed, particularly by male critics. The assumption then was that people understood the difference between men and women, and the male psyche as observed by a woman wasn’t the most interesting idea around. But since last October the world is turning upside-down and there’s a new way to look at that work as a woman trying to understand the psyche of a man.

AW: The dummy in that series is a rare male-centered artifice in your work.

LS: I found this museum in Kentucky with hundreds of ventriloquist figures and that got me really interested in that portrayal of a male figure. The dummy has always become a kind of alter-ego for the ventriloquist. It’s a way to speak through another character and not take any responsibility for your actions.

AW: There’s a lot of that alter-ego play still coming today from trends in Japan.

LS: In the last decade so much of my work has come from cosplay and from Japan. The way that Japanese culture is willing to infantilize itself for entertainment is something that I’m very responsive to. I feel oddly comfortable there, why I do, I can’t say. People who are more traveled than I am say they still find Japan to be one of the oddest places on Earth.

AW: Big Japanese trends that we become aware of almost take Western impulses and flip them on their head, like Wonderland.

LS: That’s so true. They take things that we’re comfortable with and push them really far. I really also respond to the Japanese ability to imitate and recreate things so well they’re almost superior to the original. There was a period of time when French patisserie was all the rage, and you could go to these French pastry places in Tokyo, and the vibe and the look and the taste was just so completely perfect. 

AW: That ties into your own work ­­— it’s artifice but done with technical skill that still evokes something. 

LS: And integrity, I think that’s another thing that people don’t understand about my work. They’re assuming a kind of irony or humor. That doesn’t come up for me when I’m making the work. I go for as much beauty, as much plausibility, as much realism as I can.

AW: I saw your shoot for Harper’s Bazaar this month pop up a bunch online. How did that come about for you?

LS: I love shooting fashion. Glenda Bailey, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, had wanted to do a project for a while. It seemed to me that a fashion story using models and painting on their eyes, because I had done that kind of work a few years ago, could be played with in a new way. I say I’m a fine artist, but I have many souls and definitely one of them is a commercial photographer. 

AW: What do you love about it?

LS: The thing about being an artist is you’re thrown into your own world where you make your own rules, you make your own schedule, and your challenges. You make rules, you break rules. Sometimes it’s such a relief to be given an assignment.

AW: What made you want to move into photographing real people?

LS: I found it while I was looking at YouTube make-up tutorials looking for ideas and there were a lot of Japanese girls painting anime eyes on their own eyes. After that I started using real people who wore kigurumi masks. There are people in the real world walking around in these masks. In a way that was the first time I had a doll that could really come to life. It was just a kind of progression in my own mind.

AW: Are you watching a lot of YouTube make-up tutorials?

LS: I’ve had a much too active relationship with the internet for someone my age. I’m way too consumed with internet culture. There were times when I went down a rabbit hole looking for the perfect mermaid tail.

AW: On the internet we’re seeing more girls curate their own image, and it brings about weirder things. They’re artist and model at once.

LS: Exactly. What you see is definitely not what you get in terms of people’s online life. The possibility for creating, figuratively, an avatar of yourself that you present to the world, has tremendously changed. If everything that’s available to me now had been available when I first started making work I would have burned out really quickly. That you have all of these tools for altering your face… it’s just incredible how far we’ve come in the world of fantasy.

AW: I feel like what’s fantasy and what’s not has never been closer.

LS: On Instagram alone you can take a portrait of yourself and put on adorable little kitten ears and have dancing fairies and bubbles floating up around you in less than two minutes. There’s this sense that you can humanly morph with cartoons. My desire when I was a child was to be inside those cartoons, to be part of that world. That was a very strong desire I had. And now you can.

This interview has been edited and condensed.