Autofiction

Salon 94 in collaboration with YoungArts presents Laurie Simmons: Autofiction, the artist’s recent series of image-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) works. This body of work sees Simmons experimenting with AI text-to-image models, as well as painting, drawing, and embroidery, furthering the artist’s decades-long commitment to picturing women in domestic spaces. Autofiction offers familiar themes from Simmons’ oeuvre while recognizing her as one of the first artists to seriously embrace AI. Since the 1970s with her radical use of color photography, Simmons has consistently embraced new technologies, eschewing long-held traditions of art-making. Her commitment to experimenting with new tools disrupts gendered preconceptions as they relate to women and technology. As part of her ongoing exploration of new methods for creating images, she began collaborating with the AI platforms DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. She started by inputting brief text chains into the programs that constructed real and imagined scenes from her own life which evoke her earlier work. Says Simmons, “I started using AI text-to-image models in July 2022. I liked the results and immediately felt the programs were a new kind of collaborator. I was used to inviting in toy makers, makeup artists, body painters, Photoshop, and rephotographed pictures from the Picture Library. The first AI programs were inept when generating hands and faces. I felt the need to correct my collaborator’s mistakes by adding my own embellishment: painting, drawing and sewing.” After selecting images generated from her AI collaborator, Simmons prints them on silk or linen, and then alters (“corrects”) the images by applying paint, threadwork, and collage, creating three-dimensional works that simultaneously enhance and conceal their AI origins. The latter stage reflects the human drive for symmetry and perfection, whereas the AI tools resist such instincts. Defying binary definitions, Simmons’ latest works offer a spectrum of the artist’s ongoing fascination with in-between states, where faces are doll-like, hands become flippers, and architecture is an illusion. “Autofiction” is a term used to describe writing that blends aspects of autobiography with fiction, a hybrid of real life and fantasy. As Simmons notes, “My work isn’t specifically about my own story. Rather, it’s a kind of idealized cultural memory of the position of women when I grew up. If you were to read a visual novel made up of every image I’ve ever made, it would unfold like chapters from my own fantastical autobiography.” Accompanying Autofiction, a five-minute film by Simmons will be presented at Christian Louboutin’s Miami Design District location at 155 North East 40th Street. These works further develop the backstory of the figures featured in the exhibition. The film transports viewers to another realm, immersing viewers in these character studies. In February 2024, Simmons will participate as a mentor in the YoungArts apprenticeship program. Learn more about Simmons and YoungArts here.

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