Andrew Reed Gallery is excited to present Underwater & Underneath, a solo exhibition of historic works by Laurie Simmons. The show opens on Sunday, November 30th and will be on view through Saturday, January 17th. 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 live models 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.

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Two photographs from Simmons’s Underneath hang diametrically opposite from Symmetrical Living Room, a recently completed work from the artist’s ongoing Deep Photo series. In Underneath, the artist photographed a live model, who turns her billowing garments upward to reveal a dollhouse or other diminutive set items. Symmetrical Living Room sees Simmons present the domestic space as a three-dimensional maquette, laden with a multitude of vignettes: idealized, scantily clad muses, a miniature prepared dinner, Life magazines, a record player, idyllic pastoral scenes beyond the windows. The décor of this interior corresponds to that of Room Underneath, grounding the series from nearly thirty years ago to the artist’s explorations today. With the same precision with which Simmons stages figurines and people in prior series, Simmons built out this miniature retrospective of references. 

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In Water Ballet, as in Underneath, Simmons turned to a cadre of friends, including fellow artists such as Rachel Feinstein (pictured in Underneath) and Cindy Sherman (appearing in Water Ballet), to stage her subterranean exploits. The reefs visible in some of the works ground them in the Caribbean. The editions presented number amongst the last available of their respective images. In Family Collision, figurines are suspended or nestle down at the bottom of a pool. Ripples of light shimmer across some photographs, while Boy/Bottle/Green Background is more restrained, light emanating from around our solitary protagonist. Across both human and inanimate forms, Simmons adeptly manipulates the composition to achieve corresponding effects, evident here in Boy Walking Bottom of Pool and White Man Coming.  

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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.