Laurie Simmons is known for her photographs and films using human surrogates like puppets, toys, dolls, and magazine cut-outs, among other props. Simmons has long investigated human performance as it relates to specific environments through a deep documentation and profound choreography of dolls and objects in and on a stage. The boundaries between fiction and reality are often blurred, and the artist’s tableaus are evocative of a sincere humanity, emotion and character.

In this exhibition, 14 works from Simmons’new body of photographs entitled “THE LOVE DOLL” will be paired with the artist’s new film “GEISHA SONG”. In 2009, Simmons discovered a poster advertising a plastic love doll dressed in a school girl’s uniform in a comic shop in Akihabara.“I had a strong sense I'd find something that would change my work and move it forward - a book, a prop, a background,”she said later (Laurie Simmons, The Love Doll, p.10). Simmons immediately ordered two of the customized, high-end and life-size Japanese Love Dolls. Originally intended as surrogate sex partners, the dolls arrived to her New York studio in a crate, clothed in a transparent slip and accompanied by a separate box containing an engagement ring and female genitalia. Simmons began to document her photographic relationship with this human-scale“girl”. 
The resulting photographs depict the lifelike, latex doll in an ongoing series of “actions”, shown and titled chronologically as the artist’s relationship with the prop evolves. Simmons selected clothes, accessories, props and settings for the dolls, taking various portraits of them in the living room and the kitchen, inside the pool and in the garden, among other domestic sites. She documents the figures in various moments, under changing light, and through all seasons. In the film, one of the love dolls is dressed and made-up traditionally as a Geisha, and seen in slow-moving and meticulous close-ups against the lilting melody of Marlene Dietrich’s“Falling in Love Again” sung in English with a Japanese accent.

This series will also be presented in the 10th anniversary exhibition“ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE: FROM CHAGALL TO KUSAMA AND HATSUNE MIKU”at Mori Art Museum (April 26 – September 1, 2013).

Courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery Tokyo 

*image(left)
Laurie Simmons
The Love Doll / Day 27/Day 1 (New in Box, Head), 2010
Fuji Matte print 133.4 x 177.8 cm
©Laurie Simmons
Courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery