| LAURIE SIMMONS |
Born in New York in 1949, Laurie Simmons received her B.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art in 1971, and two years later moved to New York City, where she now lives and works. Prodigiously creative, Simmons has produced 14 fully developed series of photographs since the 1970s, of which the best-known depict ventriloquists’ dummies, miniature rooms populated by dolls, and oversized objects—such as a house, birthday cake and pistol--balanced on female legs. Simmons has had solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, which in 1997 mounted a 20-year retrospective entitled The Music of Regret. A major monograph devoted to Simmons’s work, Laurie Simmons: Walking, Talking, Lying, was published by Aperture in 2005. Her work is represented in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among other public collections.
Walking Pocket Watch was made in conjunction with Simmons’s first film, The Music of Regret, a mini-musical in 3 acts, which premiered at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in May, 2006. In Act Three, The Audition, Alvin Ailey 2 dancers don the costumes of a house, a cake, a book, and a pocket watch, and compete onstage for a dancing role in a musical revue. Ticking away, the pocket watch patiently waits for her turn to audition, but the pretty cake is awarded the role before she has a chance to perform. She then dances to the Music of Regret on a dark, deserted stage, poignantly enacting what might have been. After The Audition was filmed, the present photograph of the costumed pocket watch was shot in the studio of Simmons’s husband, the artist Carroll Dunham.
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