Laurie Simmons: Walking Objects, Legs & Shoes

Edwynn Houk Gallery is pleased to announce Laurie Simmons: Walking Objects, Legs & Shoes, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition brings together photographs from three series spanning nearly two decades: Walking Objects (1987–91), Legs & Shoes (1996), and The Vogue Pictures (2005), the latter two on view for the first time.

By the early 1980s, Laurie Simmons had established herself at the forefront of a generation of artists whose approach to photography fundamentally changed the terms of contemporary art. Working with staged sets, domestic props, and the loaded imagery of postwar American culture, Simmons exposed how photographs shape the way society understands femininity, the domestic sphere, and the expectations encoded in both. She did all of this with considerable wit.

Walking Objects is among the most formally inventive bodies of work in American photography, and the series remains as relevant today as when Simmons first conceived of the work in the late 1980s. Everyday items — a house, a handbag, a microphone — appear alive and larger than life, supported by human legs or plastic doll limbs. These images extend Simmons’ long inquiry in consumer culture — how individuals are defined by what surrounds them — as well as gender roles, especially how women are treated as things to be displayed, used, or consumed. A group of works made with fellow artist and friend Jimmy DeSana, including Walking Camera (Jimmy the Camera), stands among the most unforgettable from the series.

Legs & Shoes and The Vogue Pictures, shown here for the first time, deepen the themes that Walking Objects animated. Doll legs, toy shoes, and models staged in miniature rooms: Simmons returns to the same constellation of symbols, and each series adds another layer of meaning. In glossy dye destruction prints, Legs & Shoes shows doll legs planted in oversized dress shoes, Mary Janes, and ballet slippers, exploring the expectations of growing into one’s shoes. The Vogue Pictures were made on commission for the magazine and ultimately not published. That the magazine passed on them illuminates the distance between Simmons’ vision and the conventions she was working against.

“Walking Objects was about the physicality of the body,” Simmons has said. “I was thinking about the exhaustion of a woman’s life and how strong women need to be to meet the demands that society places on them. I was also thinking about our human attachment to objects and the way we almost merge our identities with the things we own.”

Laurie Simmons lives and works in New York and Connecticut. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Hara Museum, Tokyo; and the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam, among others. A retrospective, Big Camera/Little Camera, was presented at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 2018–19. Her feature film MY ART premiered at the Venice Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017.