Art Out: Shannon Bool, Urban Stories, and Laurie Simmons
Shannon Bool
Bombshell 4, 2018 Photogram on Fibre Paper 18x28cm framed
Courtesy of the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery
Museum of Contemporary Photography | Nov. 10 - April 2, 2023
CHICAGO—The Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago (MoCP) presents Shannon Bool: 1:1 from November 10, 2022 – April 2, 2023. Shannon Bool: 1:1 is the artist’s first museum solo exhibition in the United States. Shannon Bool (Canada, b. 1972, lives and works in Berlin) is renowned for her unconventional use of materials in works that probe of the history of modernist architecture, often revealing aspects of patriarchal standards and colonialism that underly the legacies of some of its most famous practitioners. This exhibition is organized by Karen Irvine, Chief Curator and Deputy Director.
The exhibition title 1:1, plays off the scale used for architectural drawings that are the same size as the planned structure will be in real life, underscoring Bool’s interest in connecting architectural and art history with feminist concerns. In a major new tapestry commission, Bool inserts an advertising image of metallic knee-high boots onto an image of a low-tech, 1:1 model built in 2013 of Mies van der Rohe’s unrealized golf club in Krefeld, Germany. The model, made of plywood and metal, was a ghostly avatar for Mies’ unrealized design, now further abstracted into a tapestry with a feminine punch designed by Bool, undermining the utopian and austere principles of Mies’s design.
To see more of this exhibition, please visit here.
Romain Urhausen courtesy of Luxembourg Art Week
Luxembourg Art Week | Nov. 11 - 13 2022
Prolific but little known in France, Luxembourg photographer Romain Urhausen stands out for his singular style extending between the French humanist school and the German subjective school of the 1950s and 1960s, to which he actively contributed. His tinged with humor photographs, often a pretext for formal and poetic exploration, go beyond a classic depiction of reality. The exhibition shows how Urhausen took an experimental approach to daily life, working men, the cityscape, the nude and the self-portrait. The subjective aesthetic he learned from Otto Steinert influenced his formal language, treatment of contrasts, framing and way of seeing the world differently. The show highlights this vision, setting up a dialogue between Urhausen’s photographs and those of his peers by creating new “elective affinities”. Curated by Paul di Felice and Krystyna DUL.
To see more of this exhibition, please visit here
Laurie Simmons
Color Pictures/Deep Photos (Two Women/Fireplace), 2007-2022 Flex print, plastic, paper, acrylic paint, resin, wood
10 3/4 x 13 x 2 in (27.3 x 33 x 5.1 cm)
56 Henry | Nov. 9 - Jan. 15, 2023
The photographer Laurie Simmons likes to arrange and rearrange, tinker and stage, display and configure. These verbs—dainty, particular, even a little bit froufrou to the ear—might put one in mind of strictly domesticated preoccupations, meant to be seen rather than offer a way of seeing. And yet, from the time Simmons began her career in the late nineteen-seventies, she has been able to use so-called women’s work to collapse divisions between public and private, action and repose, looking and being looked at, and employ her singular photographic language toward the sweeping, capacious work of world-making. First gaining acclaim for her meticulous staging and photography of nineteen-fifties-style dollhouses, complete with miniature furniture and housewife figurines, Simmons has continued to consistently foreground the inanimate yet strangely poignant specter of the doll, whether she is a mannequin, a ventriloquist’s dummy, or a sex doll. (Sometimes, she is even a real live model, made up to look doll-like.) With each variation on this theme, Simmons has extended her narrative, telling us what it means to exist in a world crowded to near-bursting with elaborately gendered accouterments: clothing, accessories, makeup, furnishings. It is a world where every item has a meaning—one that can define but also trap you.
In “Color Pictures / Deep Photos 2007-2009,” Simmons reconfigures a photographic series she made a decade and a half ago. At the time, she downloaded and cut out images of women from amateur-porn websites, posed them in eerily lit sets alongside dollhouse furniture—tiny sinks, a toy lamp, a miniature piano—occasionally doodled or built-out decorations on their naked forms (painted polka-dot underwear, clay bras), and photographed the resulting tableaus. Meant to be printed out in a large-scale format, the series was, in the end, never officially shown, its source material perhaps considered out of step with Simmons’s more familiar midcentury imagery. Fifteen years later, the artist has returned to reconsider and play with these images once again, and we are now more than ready.
To view more of this exhibition, please visit here
