Thursday, February 28, 2013

Laurie Simmons

I originally found Laurie Simmons work after watching the film 'Tiny Furniture' by Lena Dunham. Laurie plays the main characters mother. I didn't realize at the time that she is an actual artist and not just playing one in the film. She takes pictures of tiny things, mostly dolls house furniture. I borrowed some text about her work from the gallery Carolina Nitsch, for my own research and because they explain it best.
I posted some of my favorite pieces below.

'This seminal body of work put Simmons at the forefront of a new generation of artists, predominantly women, whose photographic works began a new dialogue in contemporary art.

The use of set-up photography combined with the notion of child play – the images were shot in the rooms and before the facades of disassembled dollhouses – enabled Simmons to control perception and make reference to both general stereotypes and her own personal memories. As she arranged and rearranged the small vignettes, consisting of female dolls, dollhouse furnishings, miniature props and postcards, she was in her own words “… looking for the way your memory white-washes the image when you think about something from the past - making it far more perfect”.

Simmons, while sharing strategies with the artists known as the Pictures Generation –Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Louise Lawler and Sarah Charlesworth – and their documentation and appropriation of cultural memory, forged her own identity more closely aligned with surrealism and artists such as Man Ray, Rodchenko, Bellmer and Gordon Matta Clark’s mysterious black and white photograph collages that documented his 1970’s “building cuts”.

Simmons’ use and manipulation of dolls and interiors, marked by intentional dislocations and unexpected conjunctions, created a nonlinear narrative and abstract pictorial plane that echoes the skewed images of personal memory and dreams. Her subjects, which swell with a faux-tone of a simple, safe and secure home life, feel as relevant today as when Simmons first shot them.'


-excerpt from the carolina nitsch website.





 


Amy Cutler

 
 
Amy Cutler's work is inspired by mass media, U.S. military survival manuals, nature books, fairy tales, Japanese woodblock prints, Persian miniatures and her own personal experiences. She creates exquisitely detailed enigmatic paintings that obsessively illustrate scenes of women, animals, and hybrid beings engaged in dream like activities. Her work is created through drawing, gouache on paper, and paint on wood panels.
 
                                   
 
Cutler Vividly describes her work in terms of symbolic or metaphoric substitution:
 
" Usually when there are birds in my paintings, they represent thoughts. Right now I am using the snowman as a projected image of a significant other that disappears. Sometimes I replace a body part with an inanimate object. In these instances, the figure then embodies the function of the object. For example, in some of my paintings women have teapot heads. For me, this refers to the subservient role they play at certain points in time." -Tancons, Interview with Amy Cutler.



Monday, February 4, 2013

Ana Teresa Barboza

Truly amazing works by Ana Teresa Barboza. She is a mixed media and embroidery artist.
 I have overloaded this post with images of her work as it was impossible to pick just a few. Her blog is well worth a look at.