Turning Points | What Happened When Laurie Simmons's Dolls Came to Life

To watch the rest of the “Turning Points” series, visit http://bit.ly/TurningPoints2017.

For over four decades, Laurie Simmons has explored gender, sexuality, and modern life through photography. Along the way, her artistic journey has had plenty of twists and turns.

When Simmons finished making her first film, a short called The Music of Regret, in 2006, she had no idea where to go next. “I just had no idea,” she says. “The ‘now what?’ lasted an uncomfortably long time.”

In hindsight, it proved to move her career forward. On a trip to Japan with her younger daughter in 2009, Simmons encountered a Japanese “love doll”—a life-sized and highly realistic latex mannequin designed for sex and companionship. It was a breakthrough moment for the artist, who, since the mid-1970s, was known mainly for her narrative photographs of miniature scenes set in post-war dollhouse interiors.

She found her next inspiration in Japanese animegao kigurumi, a type of cosplay culture in which participants don masks and costumes and walk around in public portraying anime characters. With the transition from working with miniature figurines to human-scale mannequins and, then real, live characters, Simmons felt the urge to make another, longer film, her first feature film, My Art (2016). “The movie was an obsession, something that would have been more painful not to make than to make, even though it was one of the biggest challenges of my life,” she says. “So here I am as an artist, again wondering: ‘What exactly will come next?’”

Director: Freddy Arenas

Art Direction and Illustration: Freddy Arenas
Editing and Compositing: Freddy Arenas
Animation: Freddy Arenas, Mathilde Loubes, Tucker Klein, Quentin Boyer di Bernardo, and Nathan Harbonn
Music: Dashel Hammerstein
Sound Editor: Ernesto Pantin
Sound Recordist: Randy Scott Carroll
Commissioning Agent: Helen Cowley / Dutch Uncle

Production Team for Artsy:
Marina Cashdan, Head of Editorial and Creative Director
Owen Dodd, Designer
Molly Gottschalk, Features Producer
Demie Kim, Editorial Associate