Saturday 1 July 2006, 18.00

Laurie Simmons, US 2006, 40 min

Tate Modern presents the European premiere of renowned American photographer Laurie Simmons’s first film, a three-act cinematic musical starring Meryl Streep, members of the Alvin Ailey II dance company, plus a cast of vintage puppets and ventriloquist dummies.

Shot by cinematographer Ed Lachman with a bittersweet, Sondheim-flavoured score by Michael Rohatyn, the film portrays the despair and longing that has coloured the post-9/11 era.

Simmons is one of the first contemporary American photographers to create elaborately staged narrative photographs. Since the mid 1970s, she has staged scenes for the camera with dolls, mannequins and occasionally people, to create images with intensely psychological subtexts.

Her iconic ‘walking objects’ series – in which women’s legs are topped by oversized, everyday objects such as houses, cakes and guns – comes to life in The Music of Regret. The puppets sing and dance their way through the film, staging a playful, but dark, vision of a society precariously balanced between affection and grief.

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
Free, no bookings taken
Seated on a first-come, first-served basis

    

Biography:

Born in Long Island, New York in 1949, Laurie Simmons received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1971. By the early 1980s, Simmons was at the forefront of a new generation of artists, predominantly women, whose use of the media as subject began a new dialogue in contemporary art. Using dolls to act out piquant scenarios within specially constructed environments, she has slyly commented on contemporary culture while recapturing a sense of her childhood in an era she recalls as ‘both beautiful and lethal'. Populated by housewives, ventriloquists’ dummies, and familiar objects in unfamiliar guises, her diverse tableaux are often infused with bittersweet nostalgia yet charged with a disquieting sense of dislocation. Marked by intentional strangeness and unexpected conjunctions, the nonlinear narratives she creates echo those of memories and dreams.

Since her first solo exhibition at Artists Space in 1979, Simmons has had numerous solo exhibitions and her work has been exhibited extensively both in the US and abroad. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum of Art, The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC; the Hara Museum in Tokyo; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, amongst others.

In 1997, the Baltimore Museum of Art organised a retrospective of her work, entitled The Music of Regret, which included 150 photographs. Simmons has been a visiting critic at both Columbia and Yale University in the graduate photography departments. She received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1997 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1984. Simmons was the recipient of the 2005 Roy Lichtenstein Residency in Visual Arts at The American Academy in Rome. In 2002, Carolina Nitsch Editions published Photographs 1978–1979, a volume of Simmons’ early photographs with texts by the artist and Carol Squiers. In the fall of 2005, Aperture published a major monograph on the artist entitled Laurie Simmons: Walking, Talking, Lying written by Kate Linker.

Simmons lives and works in New York City with her husband, the painter Carroll Dunham, and their two daughters, Lena and Grace.

See also:

  UBS Openings: Saturday Live: Making Monkey Business with The Guerrilla Girls   Saturday 1 July 2006, 10.30–12.30

  UBS Openings: Saturday Live: The Guerrilla Girls: Your Cultural Conscience   Saturday 1 July 2006   Online Event   free

  UBS Openings: Saturday Live: PLANNINGTOROCK   Saturday 1 July 2006   free