Laurie Simmons: Actress Meryl Streep
Filmed in 2006 at Industria Studios, New York, photographer Laurie Simmons directs scenes for her first film, The Music of Regret, starring Meryl Streep.
A longtime friend of Simmons and married to a sculptor herself, Streep conveys the difficulties and advantages of leaving a solitary studio practice to work with dozens of crew and collaborators on a motion picture.
Credits
Producer: Ian Forster, Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Mead Hunt & Joel Shapiro. Sound: Roger Phenix & Merce Williams. Editor: Morgan Riles. Artwork Courtesy: Laurie Simmons, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn & Donald Rosenfeld. Special Thanks: Ed Lachman, Industria Studios, New York & Catherine Tatge. Video: © 2012 Art21, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Laurie Simmons stages photographs and films with paper dolls, finger puppets, ventriloquist dummies, and costumed dancers as “living objects,” animating a dollhouse world suffused with nostalgia and colored by an adult’s memories, longings, and regrets. Simmons’s work blends psychological, political, and conceptual approaches to art making—transforming photography’s propensity to objectify people, especially women, into a sustained critique of the medium. Mining childhood memories and media constructions of gender roles, her photographs are charged with an eerie, dreamlike quality.
