Laurie Simmons, Walking, Talking, Lying (hand signed and inscribed by Laurie Simmons), 2005

Laurie Simmons

Walking, Talking, Lying (hand signed and inscribed by Laurie Simmons), 2005

Hardback monograph (hand signed and inscribed by Laurie Simmons)

Warmly signed and inscribed by Laurie Simmons on the first front end page.

11 × 10 × 1 inches

Unframed

This elegant, illustrated hardback monograph, with no dust jacket, exactly as issued, is, exceptionally, hand signed and uniquely inscribed by Laurie Simmons.

The inscription reads:
For Arala
with much Love
BIG Love,
Laurie Simmons
You are an
actor!

Book information:
Publisher: Aperture Direct, 2005
Hardcover; 160 pages with 100 four-color images

Publisher's blurb:
Laurie Simmons is one of the first contemporary American photographers to have created elaborately staged narrative photographs. Using dolls to act out piquant scenarios within specially constructed environments, she has slyly commented on contemporary culture while re-creating "a sense of the 50s that I knew was both beautiful and lethal." Prodigiously creative, she has produced fourteen fully developed series since the 1970s. In Laurie Simmons: Walking, Talking, Lying, Kate Linker concentrates on selected series—from "Ventriloquism," "Walking Objects," and "Lying Objects" to the 1997 Self-Portraits and the "Café of the Inner Mind"—to illuminate ideas that cut through the artist's entire body of work. Of particular interest are the willfully ambiguous interplay between objects, figures, and backgrounds, and the way specific things (toys, cakes, guns) and settings (suburban interiors, theatrical stages) take on strange powers in Simmons's photographs. As Linker makes clear, the artist's use of narrative links her to a number of contemporary fiction writers, while her fondness for artifice, advertising, childhood memory, and unabashed eclecticism relates to—and has helped shape—the heated debates of the past thirty-some years about the nature of photography.Laurie Simmons: Walking, Talking, Lying was made possible with generous support from Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy and from the E. T. Harmax Foundation.

About Laurie Simmons:
Laurie Simmons (b. 1949), a central figure of the Pictures Generation, is a photographer and filmmaker who imbues her subjects (primarily dolls, puppets, and other inanimate human-like entities) with living energy, suffusing synthetic spaces with nostalgia colored by an adult’s memories, longing, and regret. Simmons’s work blends psychological, political, and conceptual approaches to artmaking transforming photography’s propensity to objectify people, especially women, into a sustained critique of the medium. Mining childhood memories and media constructions of gender roles, her photographs are charged with an eerie, dreamlike quality. On first glance, her works often appear whimsical, but there is a disquieting aspect to Simmons’s child’s play, as her characters struggle over identity in an environment in which the value placed on consumption, designer objects, and domestic space is inflated to absurd proportions.
Simmons has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (TX) in 2018, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (IL) in 2019; Laurie Simmons: How We See at the Jewish Museum, New York (NY) in 2015; and The Fabulous World of Laurie Simmons at the Neues Museum, Nuremberg (DE) in 2014, among many others. In 2019, Simmons’ photography was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s historic reopening in New York (NY).
The artist is currently included in New Time: Art & Feminisms in the 21st Century at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (CA) through January 2022 and Connecting Currents: Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (TX) through Spring 2022. Recent group exhibitions include The Paradox of Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (MN) in 2021; NOT I: Throwing Voices (1500 BCE - 2020 CE) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA) in 2020; and Look at Me at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 2020.
The artist is included in many public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago (IL); the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge (MA); the International Center of Photography, New York (NY); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (NY); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (CA); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (NY); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (NY); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (NY), among many others.

Courtesy of Salon 94