If Carolina Nitsch Project Room isn’t the smallest storefront gallery in Chelsea, it must be in the top three. Maybe that’s what makes it so successful. Every time I go, it’s packed with an interesting show that is just big enough to contain something worthwhile but still small enough not to get on my nerves with a glut of mediocre material.
Nitsch is currently showing “In And Around the House,” the first gallery survey of Laurie Simmons’s early black-and-white photographs. Taken from 1976-8, these photographs provide a neat glimpse into the fetal stages of Simmons’s now famous aesthetic. In them, it’s possible to see a pared-down version of the tropes that Simmons would become known for later in life–the surrealist critiques of femininity and consumer culture that turned magazine, toy, and advertising aesthetics on their heads.
Much of the exhibition is arranged into series that form almost-stories, monochromatic comic strips in which a tiny female figurine wrestles with inexplicable dilemmas: a chair that needs to be lifted onto the back of a tow truck, or living room sets that disappear only to be replaced by chalk outlines. There is something dreamlike in the allure of these narratives, and Simmons’s little figurine is inevitably the sympathetic character. In her most realistic work, the toy woman meanders around a well-stocked kitchen, apparently waiting for something. The amount of emotion Simmons squeezes from an expressionless, stiff-jointed toy is testimony to her extraordinary talent as an artist.
The exhibition is accompanied by a great little monograph from Carolina Nitsch and Hatje Cantz. It includes an essay by Carol Squiers, who notes that–somewhat ironically–Simmons began working with toy sets in hopes of getting a commercial job as a photographer for a toy company. Also tucked into this monograph is an insightful autobiographical essay by Simmons, including reminiscences about the way her sense of space was affected by growing up in a home that did double duty as her father’s dentist office. This is a must-see exhibition for anyone interested in the origins of Simmons’s work, and a refreshingly concise and well-presented show in the often dreary Chelsea summer.
“In And Around the House” runs from May 17 to June 28, 2008.
Image © Laurie Simmons.
