The Arts Club exhibits the work of the American photographer Laurie Simmons, ahead of key museum exhibitions of her work at The Jewish Museum, New York, and at The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM) in 2015.
Best known for her photographs of realities using dolls, ventriloquist dummies, mannequins and people, Simmons creates images with psychological subtexts. Her work explores the loneliness and melancholy of modern living. While her diverse characters range from toy ballerinas to tiny cowboys, themes of gender and sexuality, domesticity and nostalgia return in series across her practice.
At The Arts Club, key moments have been selected from across Simmons’ career: from her photographs of constructed scenes in miniature dollhouses taken in the early 1970s, to recent work with a life-sized sex doll dressed as a geisha. In this latter series, called The Love Doll, it is not immediately evident that the doll is not a real person. After working with miniature dolls and sets for 25 years, this series marked an important new direction for Simmons, as she explains:
‘I realised that I could take this doll and put it into the landscape and suddenly I was on a scale with everything else…it was like the entire rest of the world got unlocked’.
EXHIBITION
Laurie Simmons
Through April 26th 2015
The Arts Club
40 Dover Street, Mayfair
London, W1S 4NP
United Kingdom
