Introduction to Emulation Project

Background Info

 Photographer and filmmaker Laurie Simmons is a renowned American artist known for her pioneering work in the field of conceptual photography. In 1949, Simmons was born in Long Island, New York. Growing up, her family encouraged her interest in art. She earned her BFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia in 1971 and later moved to New York City to pursue a career in art. Simmons gained recognition for her early work in the late 1970s and early 1980s, using a large-format camera and color film. She began creating photographs of dollhouses that evoke Dutch paintings of interiors and the advertisements found in 1950s housekeeping magazines. These images, which were featured in her seminal series "Early Color Interiors," were at once playful and uncanny, inviting viewers into a world of miniature domesticity that was both familiar and strange. Through her use of scale, color, and composition, Simmons explored the relationship between reality and illusion, and challenged traditional notions of femininity and domesticity.

What or Who Influenced

Laurie Simmons was heavily influenced by her suburban childhood as she would often draw from her own memories “to create a visual universe characterized by a sense of the uncanny created through combinations of the familiar and unfamiliar posed to provoke, rather than to answer, questions about relationships between play, the domestic sphere and sexuality.” Once Simmons was an established photographer, she worked with film as a means of further exploring issues of character. Simmons works with inanimate objects, such as dolls and furniture to challenge the viewer's sense of power. She seeks to animate her inanimate subjects and give them psychological expression. Giving the inanimate objects life and the ability to return the gaze challenges objectification. “Simmons' work can be seen as defying male traditions of viewing in the way through borrowing from established modes of representation and subverting them.” Throughout her career, Simmons has also explored themes related to identity, memory, and desire.