Laurie Simmons, Color Pictures/Deep Photos (Pink Dressing Table with Toiletries) (2022), via 56 Henry
On view this month at 56 Henry in New York, Color Pictures/Deep Photos 2007–2022, surveys a collection of new work by Laurie Simmons on view from November 9, 2022 through January 15, 2023. Marking the artist’s first show with the gallery, the exhibition underscores Simmons work in the photographic medium, revisiting a series of works she first made over a decade ago.
Laurie Simmons, Color Pictures/Deep Photos (Girl in Bra/Checkered Wall/Sink/Hamper) (2022), via 56 Henry
Much of Simmons’s work is predicated on rearrangement, cutting and reworking, staging and reframing her subjects and forms to create new iterations and modes that continue to breathe new life and context into her work. First gaining acclaim for her meticulous staging and photography of nineteen-fifties-style dollhouses, complete with miniature furniture and housewife figurines, Simmons has continued to consistently foreground the inanimate yet strangely poignant specter of the doll, whether she is a mannequin, a ventriloquist’s dummy, or a sex doll. (Sometimes, she is even a real live model, made up to look doll-like.) With each variation, her work takes her narrative explorations ever further, examining and re-examining the meaning of the image in relation to her modes of work.
Laurie Simmons, Color Pictures/Deep Photos (Walt Disney and the Lipstick Forest) (2022), via 56 Henry
For this body of work, first derived from cut-out images of amateur pornography, the artist posed her figures in eerily lit dollhouse sets, or adorned their bodies with various graphical gestures and drawings. But the works were never shown, perhaps considered at the time as standing outside much of her earlier work. Here, however, they return under a new series of iterations and explorations. Simmons reconfigures the series she made a decade and a half ago, printed in a much smaller format, and set into frames that are then covered over with clear resin. The result are works that present as much as photographic images as assemblages, new contexts and concepts submerged under the resin with the original works in tow.
Laurie Simmons, Color Pictures/Deep Photos (White Toilet/Girl in Jeans/Pink Sink) (2022), via 56 Henry
Simmons presents a series of bodies subject to a series of permutations and framings, and turns them, into deep meditations on time, use and the politics of the body. Despite their playful, colorful forms, the works ask difficult questions about the female body and its economic implications. Given a new life in an era of OnlyFans models and attention-economy platforms, Simmons re-visiting of these works seems exceedingly timely.
The show closes January 15th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Laurie Simmons at 56 Henry [Exhibition Site]
