Danielle Arnold

Final

LOUISE BOUGARISLAURIE SIMMONS

CAO FEI

LOUISE BOUGOURIS

Helping Hands, detail, 1993–96Installation view at Jane Addams Memorial Park, Chicago, 2000Production still from the "Art in the Twenty-First Century" Season 1 episode, "Identity," 2001© Art21, Inc. 2001

“I am not what I do I am what my hands do.” – Louise Bougouris Louise Bougouris worked with plaster casts of hands placed on stone for Jane Addams memorial park. The hands were used to symbolize the help the Jane Addams gave to others. The hands were set in a memorial for Jane Addams so that people could admire it while walking through. Though Bougouris was nervous about vandalism she continued to put her work in public, later when the artwork was taking down for the very thing she was afraid of, Louise worked to restore them even though she was much older now.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

When watching the video for Bourgeois’ hands, I was inspired by the hands. When I think of holding hands, I think of love in the simplest and most innocent form. Louise’s hands represented more than just love but lending a helping hand. When realizing that I automatically thought of the quote “ I can conquer the world with one hand as long as you are holding the other.” I had to condense the quote to make it fit.

Laurie Simmons uses paper dolls, ventriloquist dummies, baby dolls and dancers to create an image telling a story. Laurie Simmons also directs movies, she has directed a movie with Meryl Streep and a ventriloquist dummies. Laurie Simmons has also used cosplaying, the act of dressing up as a favorite character, to create art. The image to the left is one of her new pictures, from 2014, of cosplaying a doll. The image posses an eerie feel from the childlike face of the doll that is also adult like. With a lot of her work, there are dolls doing a house hold work or things that are deemed feminine. Simmons mixes adult like themes with childlike views and vice versa. From her work there is a sense of remembering your childhood while also staying in your everyday life.

LAURIE SIMMONS

Laurie Simmons, Yellow Hair/Red Coat/Snow/Selfie, 2014; pigment print; 70 × 48 inches. Courtesy the artist and Salon 94, New York, NY

when I saw Laurie’s work I kept seeing the image of the inner child, and that is what I tried to recreate. When viewing Laurie’s work I get two different stories; one because of the use of the doll I think of children so I get the impression of a child doing adult things like cooking, cleaning, and taking care of a house but on the other hand because of the doll I see an adult who is stuck in a childlike state not wanting to grow up. From Simmons’ images while cute, I get a particularly eerie feeling looking at the dolls, which is what I tried to keep in my own image.

LAURIE SIMMONS

Cao Fei uses the game Second Life to create art. Second Life is a simulation game where people are allowed to create an avatar and a world of their own imagination. Cao believes that Cao Fei

Production still from the "Art in the Twenty-First Century" Season 5 episode, "Fantasy," 2009Segment: Cao Fei

CAO FEI

I found this so fascinating, as a person who likes to play simulation games for fun when killing time, I never thought of what I was doing as art but watching Cao Fei’s videos on her creating her world inspired me to go outside of my normal play and do more with what I already use. Fei said that people use simulation games to step outside of themselves and create a persona that they wish they really were. In so many ways I see the truth of this, playing games like second life or sims, in my case, people create an avatar based off themselves or who they wish they were, so that is what I did in my image. I am a hopeless romantic that loves a good love story, or cheesy image.

CAO FEI