The Instant Decorator
Laurie Simmons
Simmons’s “Instant Decorator” series, which continues her ongoing exploration of figure and interior, was inspired by Frances Joslin Gold’s 1976 book of the same title. This do-it-yourself home-design planner, featuring line drawings of conventional rooms on transparent acetate paper, allowed home decorators to sample fabric and wallpaper combinations of their own invention. But while the concept suffered one fundamental flaw – the discrepancy between the scale of the actual textiles and that of the rooms – Simmons used the creative potential of this shortcoming to her advantage. Like the sense of dislocation that characterized her early photographs of dollhouse interiors (a project, coincidently, that also began in 1976, and was recently documented in the book In and Around the House), the aesthetic inconsistencies of the new work assure a collection of domestic spaces that are simultaneously seductive and disturbing, evocative and unknown.
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Simmons’s “Instant Decorator” series, which continues her ongoing exploration of figure and interior, was inspired by Frances Joslin Gold’s 1976 book of the same title. This do-it-yourself home-design planner, featuring line drawings of conventional rooms on transparent acetate paper, allowed home decorators to sample fabric and wallpaper combinations of their own invention. But while the concept suffered one fundamental flaw – the discrepancy between the scale of the actual textiles and that of the rooms – Simmons used the creative potential of this shortcoming to her advantage. Like the sense of dislocation that characterized her early photographs of dollhouse interiors (a project, coincidently, that also began in 1976, and was recently documented in the book In and Around the House), the aesthetic inconsistencies of the new work assure a collection of domestic spaces that are simultaneously seductive and disturbing, evocative and unknown.
