The Love Doll/Day 8 (Lying in Bed)
- The Love Doll/Day 8 (Lying in Bed)
Frame: 74 1/2 × 51 1/2 × 2 in. (189.2 × 130.8 × 5.1 cm)
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From early in her artistic career, Laurie Simmons turned to dolls, toys, mannequins, and ventriloquist dummies as surrogates through which to speak. Her Love Doll series features a life-size, latex, anatomically correct “Real Love Doll” discovered by the artist during an extended stay in Japan in 2009. Recalling her earlier photographs staged in dollhouses, this later series, in which Simmons effectively turned her own home into a human-size dollhouse, blurs the distinction between fiction and reality. In this series, childhood doll-play collides with an eerie and somewhat disturbing sexual innuendo.
Provenance[Salon 94, New York, 2010]; purchased by Barbara and Michael Gamson, 2010; given to MFAH, 2022.
Exhibition History"The Love Doll: Days 1-30," in New York, at Salon 94, Feb. 15-Mar. 26, 2011 and in London, at Wilkinson Gallery, June 9-July 10, 2011; "The Love Doll (Geisha): Days 31-36," in Aspen, Colorado, at Baldwin Gallery, Mar. 16-Apr. 15, 2012; and "The Love Doll," in Tokyo, at Tomio Koyama Gallery, in 2013
Published References Simmons, Laurie; Greenberg Rohatyn, Jean (introductory essay by) (2012). Tillman, Lynne (ed.). The Love Doll (Exhibition catalog). New York / Tokyo: Salon 94 / Tomio Koyama. ISBN 978-0-615-59689-1. OCLC 829059684. Koné, Christophe. "Laurie Simmons’ The Love Doll: Looking at a Sex Doll Anew." denkste: puppe-multidisziplinäre zeitschrift für mensch-puppen-diskurse 3, no. 1.2 (2020): 109-113. Koné, Christophe André. "Such a doll!: man-made dolls in German modern culture and their afterlife in postmodern visual culture." PhD diss., Rutgers University-Graduate School-New Brunswick, 2015. Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks
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