On Sunday, November 30th from 6-8pm, the gallery opens Underwater & Underneath, a solo exhibition of historic works by Laurie Simmons. This is Simmons’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and will survey works from her Water Ballet, Family Collision and Underneath series, which were made in the early eighties and late nineties. Water Ballet and Family Collision show both human bodies and figurines respectively moving freely in atmospheric, underwater tableaux, nudging the viewer toward a hopeful vision of liberation from societal expectations. Nearly two decades later, Underneath shifts to a more critical exploration, depicting mannequins whose clothing reveals the idealized domestic spaces that lie beneath, where one would otherwise expect to encounter flesh. Together, these works trace Simmons's evolution as an image maker, while maintaining her signature feminist point of view.

Laurie Simmons (b. New York City) is an American artist best known for her photographic and film work. Art historians consider her a key figure of The Pictures Generation and part of a group of women artists who emerged in the late-1970s as a counterpoint to the male-dominated and formalist fields of painting and sculpture. Simmons's elaborately constructed images employ psychologically charged human proxies—dolls, ventriloquist dummies, props, miniatures and interiors—and live models. Often noted for its humor and pathos, her art explores boundaries such as between artifice and truth or private and public, while raising questions about the construction of identity, tropes of prosperity, consumerism and domesticity, and practices of self-presentation and image-making.