CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/12/2013

Real-Life and Art-Fiction: Laurie Simmons, The Love Doll

As seemingly all the world gears up for this weekend's second season premiere of Lena Dunham's "cruelly insightful and rigorously downbeat comedy," Girls, we thought it appropriate to feature new work by Laurie Simmons, key member of the Pictures Generation, bona fide international art star, and, yes, Dunham's mother. (Okay, she was also great as the art star / mother character in Dunham's breakout first film, Tiny Furniture.) Featured image, "The Love Doll, Day 11 (Yellow)" (2010), is reproduced from The Love Doll, Simmons recent book of photographs of high-end Japanese sex dolls in various domestic settings and character roles. In her introduction, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn writes, "Practical and ruefully domestic, Simmons brought the doll to her Connecticut home, where the house was re-purposed into a color-coordinated, oversized dollhouse, and so began her brilliant blur of art and life, studio and home. The 1912 Colonial house plays a central role in the photographs, and lends the work an air of intimacy and authenticity. Real-blue sky; black and white tile floor, and wainscoting replace Simmons’ once smallscale model interiors. The family’s dog and cat roam in and out of a few scenes. Real-life and art-fiction find their way into the photographs, and our rapport with the Love Doll grows." Like mother, like daughter. Simmons will sign copies of The Love Doll next Wednesday, January 16, at Dashwood Books, New York.