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Laurie Simmons at Sperone Westwater

Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Edward Leffingwell

Beyond her valley of the dolls, Laurie Simmons's recent photographs hold up to ridicule and contempt the furnishings of consumer culture and desire. She overloads the architecture of made-up modern interiors with collages of superfluous objects and disaffected people, basing her mise-en-scenes on clippings from Frances Joslin Gold's 1976 do-it-yourself guide to interior design, The Instant Decorator, which also serves as the title for this project. An affluent, largely white population of self-absorbed postwar consumers is pictured in line drawings, as cartoon figures and in photographs assembled in a manner that recalls Richard Hamilton's collage of 1956, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? She includes surly groups of louche men in lounge suits and evening jackets culled from racy magazines, scarcely connected to a sorority of women characterized as vamps, housewives in hair rollers and underwear models who resemble Doris Day. Presented with a riot of possible furnishings, Simmons chooses fabric and wallpaper patterns and compounds them without regard to scale or convention.

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In stylish response to the question "Can a home ever have too much plaid?" Simmons thinks not. In the 30-by-40-inch print The Instant Decorator (Plaid Living Room), 2004, a chic hostess lounges on the floor in the company of an unseen visitor whose presence is suggested by decanters and two snifters. Among the draperies and furniture upholstered in this redundancy of plaids are other tropes of the sportsman's lodge--chandeliers, racks of antlers, hunting prints framed in plaids.

In The Instant Decorator (Wood Paneled Den), 2001, a bored Lothario in patterned shirt and tie slouches into the foreground of a resolutely flat interior, oblivious to the glamorous vamp across the room. He joins the disaffected cast of The Instant Decorator (Wood Paneled Den, Bachelor Party), 2004, ignoring an oafish swinger who feigns astonishment as a kneeling stripper reaches for his belt. A 2003 companion piece, The Instant Decorator (Pink and Green Bedroom/Slumber Party) locates a bevy of lingerie models in a room oddly crammed with images of horses.

These prints are evenly saturated with color and a bright, almost lurid light of a consistent value. The exhibition concluded with a sign of things to come, five chromogenic prints from a suite of highly theatrical images. The noir interiors of "The Long House" series are named for artist Charles Long, who presented Simmons with a dollhouse. The women who are the objects of the tableaux she produces are again culled from photographs or line art, and each is presented in a way that invests a scene with a nonspecific narrative, heightened by a sense of anticipation and anxiety. In that regard, they recall "The Instant Decorator" series, but they are illuminated by the raking light she introduces to the scene.--Edward Leffingwell

Laurie Simmons at Sperone Westwater

Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Edward Leffingwell

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