Boston Globe feature: Laurie Simmons: when a house is not a home
The photographer’s playful yet disquieting images are on display at BU
Boston Globe feature – Laurie Simmons: when a house is not a home
The photographer’s playful yet disquieting images are on display at BU.
This article was originally published in the Boston Globe, by Mark Feeney, on November 14, 2024.
There are only 22 photographs in “1998: Works by Laurie Simmons,” but the show feels much larger than that.
“1998″ runs through Dec. 7 at Boston University’s Stone Gallery. It’s been curated by the Boston Athenaeum’s Lauren Graves. A virtual tour is available at bu.edu/cfa/featured-work/1998-laurie-simmons.
Part of what accounts for that largeness is straightforward enough. None of the pictures in the show is small, with one as big as 4 feet by 5 feet. Part of it is perceptual: Simmons turns scale inside out. The items she presents so large are themselves small: architectural models, toy furniture and figurines. And part of the largeness is conceptual. These images, which might look at first almost comically simple, engage with some deeply complex themes: domesticity, security, shelter, the unreality of reality. That none of the pictures have mattes makes them almost look like windows (speaking of incongruous architectural features).
A phrase like “unreality of reality” sounds both empty and gimmicky. With “1998″ it’s neither. Simmons stages settings familiar from everyday life: business offices and comfortably middle-class houses. Yet in using miniatures and models, she’s showing reality in an explicitly unreal fashion: artifice that declares its artificiality. Further underscoring the unreality is Simmons’s use of Cibachrome prints, which have the rich, saturated look of magazine advertising.
Beyond that, there’s an even more significant unreality here: the sort of matter-of-fact affluence that’s generally taken for granted. Which means it tends to pass unnoticed how unusual such a condition is for many people in this country and most people in the rest of the world. It’s not just physical scale these photographs call into question. It’s moral scale, too.
Simmons, who turned 75 last month, is a member of the Pictures Generation group of artists, which emerged in the 1970s. The photographers among them drew heavily on popular culture and tended to stage what they photographed. Landscape held no interest for them. Inscape did. Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” series is the quintessential example. What movies were for Sherman, toys (overtly) and advertising (less directly) were for Simmons. She has a further, personal relation to popular culture. The writer-director and actress Lena Dunham is the daughter of Simmons and her husband, the painter Carroll Dunham.
The title “1998″ comes from the year in which Simmons took the photographs. The gallery website further cites the Taylor Swift album “1989″ as inspiration. Well, if albums with year titles are relevant, why not Prince’s “1999″? Portions of the dwelling in the biggest photo, “Pink House,” display a shade that approaches a color His Purpleness would have approved of.
These pictures are on a continuum with Simmons’s landmark 1976 series “In and Around the House,” albeit with several significant differences. Those pictures of dolls and dollhouses are in black and white, much smaller, and “inhabited.” Most of the settings in “1998″ lack people. They’re up close and impersonal. This adds to their general sense of deadpan eeriness. These pictures aren’t quite alarming, but they’re distinctly unsettling, akin to David Lynch without the kinks.
Actually, without the kinks isn’t quite right. “House Underneath (Standing)” shows a woman, seen from the waist down, lifting her filmy white dress to reveal a house beneath it. Or “Room Underneath (Gold)” shows a woman from the neck down — the lack of a face in both photographs makes the women seem as much objects as the dolls are — wearing a décolleté gown (organza?) with an image of a room nesting at the vertex of her uncrossed legs.
The key difference with Lynch is that the image-making he’s famous for involves motion pictures. The ones in “1998″ are still (though Simmons has directed, too). All photographs are still, of course, but these convey a stillness beyond stillness. The explicit artifice contributes to that effect, as does Simmons’s use of lighting. The three “Modern Office” pictures have a strong, raking light. In the 10 “Deluxe-Redding House” photographs, odd, unexpected shadows keep showing up. Simmons’s lighting, like her use of scale, helps her impart such unfamiliarity to the ostensibly familiar. In “1998,” a version of the uncanny valley takes up residence in an uncanny suburb and uncanny workspace.