Laurie Simmons: In and Around the House

It has been a year since my last entry, and I thought that writing about Laurie Simmons would be the perfect place to begin. Simmons was one of the first women photographers in the 1970s, creating work during a decade in which photography was still becoming accepted as a viable medium for art making. "In and Around the House", her seminal work from 1976-1978, is a series of photographs that depict scenes from the interior spaces of a dollhouse. These scenes are nostalgic and traditional, and what you might expect to find within its walls. However, on closer look, some of these scenes and in particular, the placement of the miniaturized dolls, are unexpected. One critic describes them to be "about the time of memory, and about those emotions which are fundamentally temporal: longing, nostalgia, presentiment, anxiety, expectation, dread." Simmons describes her pictures of the doll (which she named Jane, after her friend, the painter Jane Kaplowitz) as looking "empty and desolate. I felt that their mood counterbalanced the cuteness of the doll, and I surprised myself by finding them acceptable."

These two images are among my favorite from the series. In the first, Jane is seated on the floor, in between the chair in which she ought to be comfortably reclined, and the television opposite it. Instead, she has been displaced from her chair and positioned to face the viewer. It is a confrontational image, and one that calls into question the entire arrangement and its underlying meaning.

The same kind of displacement can apply to the second image, which depicts a messy kitchen either before or after a meal has been prepared. The clock reads a few minutes after 6:00, so most likely it is dinner time. It is filled with suggestions of a meal, and the hint of family, but there is none. Instead, it is empty and uncomfortable to view with every detail, including the arrangement of the chairs, in which a third (positioned between the table and the kitchen counter) has either fallen down or been knocked over. It is eerie, and the events either before or after this moment is left to the imagination of the viewer.

This series of photographs was most recently exhibited at Carolina Nitsch Project Room in New York in June 2008. Simmons lives and works in New York City and is represented by Sperone Westwater.

Woman/Interior IV, 1976
Black and white photograph
5 1/4 x 8 inches
Edition of 10

Empty Kitchen, 1976
Black and white photograph
5 1/4 x 8 inches
Edition of 10