Laurie Simmons
We don't have real hours and we don't have a boss, so artists create rules for themselves that they then break. It's transgressive in such a personal way.
When I was in art school, there was a stigma attached to coming from comfortable suburbia. If you were from Great Neck, Long Island, you couldn't be a 'real artist', so I found crafty ways of implying that I was from New York.
I'm innately conservative, and painting is an ideal place to exercise a progressive conservatism. I operate well within limits.
My favourite thing is to discover what someone does well and say, 'Do that for me.'
Parenthetically, I have to say, I don't particularly like dolls, nor have I ever liked them.
I've always gone for a kind of perfection.
My father was a dentist. And my mother was a - do we still say 'housewife'? A home engineer.
I love acting. I can't believe how fun it is and how in-the-zone I am when I'm doing it.
It's funny: when you're an artist, your own work goes in and out of fashion with you.
When I had my first show at Artists Space in 1979, I imagined my life like game show. There were two doors: one door had a big dollar sign on it, and the other just had sort of a blurry picture of a newspaper - the money door or the critical response and acclaim door.
Who knew that being an artist was a glamour job?
My career has been a slow burn with many peaks and valleys.
I had grown up in a world dominated by women - I had aunts and sisters and great-aunts - and I just felt like I lived in a completely female world.
I thought my father was biggest, tallest, smartest, handsomest man in the world, so if he was telling me something, I was taking it really seriously.
I was always very proud of myself that I could wrest emotion from a doll or a puppet. It never occurred to me that I could find real emotion in a person.
From the time I started taking photographs, I started working with plastics. I've always treated plastic like it was marble or gemstone or fine glass. I've always gotten the most out of it. I love it!
I never could have predicted that I would have done something that could be called portraiture.
I'm way more influenced by my children than I was by my parents.
I don't like touching things that are the curatorial flavor of the month.
I always say I'm an artist with the soul of a realtor.
Like all artists, I'm a complete cinephile; I see everything. I see past movies, present movies, indie movies, experimental movies.
I think that I came of age in the 1970s with my own work, and it was a time of conceptual and process art, and it was very important not to tell a story. If you told a story, when I was a young artist and first came to N.Y., it was, like, an embarrassing way to make art.
I've always written about other artists, or I write my thoughts down, but I've never written a story.
I think the art world is one of the last bastions of this kind of sexism where there is a mythology about a woman not being able to be both and artist and a mother: that some very important creative crystal inside a woman would be shattered by the idea of having a child.
There's part of our culture where uniqueness is celebrated and appreciated and another part of our culture where this one way to be - one color hair, one sized breasts, one kind of nose - that's also front and center.
My subject has always been women. And I don't want to sound, like, preposterously idealistic, but I would like, in my lifetime, to experience a world where women, all kind of women, can connect and support each other.
I think, with my own daughters, rather than preaching a feminine agenda, I just really try to help them understand what it meant to be a woman in the late 20th century and the consciousness of how to be a woman in the 21st century: What is working for you and what is working against you.
I can't even relate to the idea of raising a feminist.
Your ringtone is so personal to you, but the fact is millions of other people have your ringtone. I really love that connection, and call me crazy, but I find the iPhone ringtones super melodic and very danceable.
Any work that is really great hovers between terrific and terrible.Collection: Terrible
I'm not interested in telling a story in my photographic work. I'm more interested in freezing certain moments in time.Collection: Stories
I always try so hard to find a male doll and shoot a male doll, and it always kind of implodes. Whenever I use men, they're so scary and so dark, and I can never find this sort of lightness or this place between doll and human that I find with female dolls.Collection: Dark
I'm very interested in stopping time. And starting time. There is that aspect of time that I'm playing with, that it's elusive and unnoticed yet really in the end the most important thing.Collection: Important
The challenge has always been to wrest emotion out of a [doll's] face that we think of as only having one emotion. It's moving a light, moving my camera; it's just this mental investment that I make, and suddenly, everything changes. Parenthetically, I have to say, I don't particularly like dolls, nor have I ever liked them. That's something I really wanted to get out there right away.Collection: Moving
I realized early on that artifice attracted me to an image more than any other quality - I mean artifice in the sense of staging and heightened color and exaggerated lighting, not a surreal or fictive moment... I think the lighting and feeling of Cinemascope, the movies I saw as a kid, always stayed with me as a kind of glorious vision of reality.Collection: Mean
People are much more willing nowadays to believe that pictures lie than [that] they can express any kind of truth.Collection: Lying
My father was a dentist. And my mother was a - do we still say "housewife"? A home engineer.Collection: Mother
I think the big news there - most post-menopausal women I know are not celibate.Collection: Thinking
You mine your own past in order to get to know yourself.Collection: Past
I think making features has got to be in the addiction category.Collection: Thinking
Oh god, success is so exhausting.Collection: Exhausting
I use people that are close to me, like a studio assistant or a friend, someone I know who's going to really enjoy it. It's important to me to have men inside there, too, because so many dollers are men. It's putting me into a pretty odd headspace, the shooting, because I understand the motivation of these dollers to dress up. There's a way that you start to prefer the reality of that world to your own world. It's so much more beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
I feel like I spent so much time trying to understand my identity and my identity as an artist. But when all is said and done, at this age, I feel the most like I felt when I was 11. And all those talents I had when I was 11 and 12 - I'm letting them sort of happen again. I can't speak for men, but for women - we go back to a kind of pre-adolescent state when we were superfree and supercool.Collection: Artist
...Let's get to the image as quickly as possible, let's get to the message even faster, and let's find the scale to knock you over the head with the image and the message.Collection: Messages
I've always gone for a kind of perfection. In the end, it's so much better to get the feeling of, "Wow, she's so perfect," from a doll than to have to bear that from a woman in a magazine.Collection: Perfect
I remember years ago hearing a gynecologist say, "Women report a great sense of calm and well-being post-menopause." This was way before I was even thinking about it, but I thought, "Hmm, that might be something to look forward to. A sense of well-being!"Collection: Thinking
The thing that a lot of people may or may not know is every artist is a cinephile, whether they watch movies whether they're painting, or have films that influence them.Collection: Artist
I feel like an artist often turns the camera on themselves and on their own families to understand who they are.Collection: Artist
I teach a graduate photo seminar at Yale, and I sometimes feel so overwhelmed by the task the students set before themselves to be artists, because - it seems so quaint, but when I picked up a camera with a group of other women, I'm not gonna say it was a radical act, but we were certainly doing it in some sort of defiance of, or reaction to, a male-dominated world of painting.Collection: Artist
The challenge has always been to wrest emotion out of a doll face that we think of as only having one emotion. It's moving a light, moving my camera; it's just this mental investment that I make, and suddenly, everything changes.Collection: Moving