Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago's major retrospective of works by Laurie Simmons (American, b. 1949) celebrates an artist who has distinguished herself as a pioneer of new directions in art photography. Since the late 1970s, when she began to develop her mature style using dolls and props as proxies for people and places, Simmons has explored archetypal gender roles with her work. Turning a critical eye on tropes that dominated the postwar era of her upbringing, Simmons creates fictional scenes that mirror and unsettle the American dream of prosperity and feminine domesticity.

In addition to taking a strong feminist stance, Simmons upends traditional ideas about photography as a medium. The namesake work of the exhibition, Big Camera/Little Camera(1976), shows an actual camera juxtaposed with a miniature one, exemplifying Simmons's other central interest: manipulating scale. “I put the two cameras together for scale,” Simmons explains, “and as a metaphor—real life versus fiction.”