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(NEW YORK, NY — December 1, 2024) —Times Square Arts, the public platform for contemporary performance and visual arts, is pleased to announce December’s Midnight Moment, Autofiction: Moving Pictures, Waiting & Looking Up by celebrated artist Laurie Simmons – a series of vignettes Simmons generated using AI to construct real and imagined scenes from the her own life, shaping the imagery with experimental prompts and an eerie, dream-like quality.
Times Square Arts’ Midnight Moment program is the world’s largest, longest-running digital art exhibition, synchronized on over 92 electronic billboards throughout Times Square nightly from 11:57pm to midnight. Simmon’s work is currently on view in Times Square until December 30th.
Autofiction: Moving Pictures, Waiting & Looking Up is a journey through AI-generated vignettes – from domestic scenes and indoor pools to city centers and desolate open roads - featuring a shape-shifting cast of women. The animated work is created with the AI platforms DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, which mark a new development in her methodology. Exploring personal memories and scrutinizing gender roles through surreal vignettes, Simmons’ signature style and artistic vision remain intact as her aesthetics are translated into the digital form.
"We are humbled to have Laurie Simmons take over the screens of Times Square—a natural extension of her journey from the Pictures Generation, where she challenged media constructions and established photography as conceptual art,” says Jean Cooney, Director of Times Square Arts. “Simmons now turns her lens on AI—bringing her timeless inquiries into media and technology to one of the most iconic stages of contemporary culture."
"I was used to collaborating with toymakers, makeup artists, body painters, and Photoshop editors, as well as sourcing images from the Picture Library,” says Laurie Simmons. “In July 2022 I started using AI text-to-image models, which I began calling ‘My Collaborators’, as the images we made together fit so seamlessly into the continuum of all my work. I love the way this new work finds a space between painting, photography, drawing and sculpture.”
Autofiction: Moving Pictures, Waiting & Looking Up was produced by Danielle Bartholomew.
In addition to the premiere of Autofiction: Looking Up for December’s Midnight Moment, Times Square Arts will bring Simmon’s work along with a curated selection from past Midnight Moments to Miami as part of Art Basel Miami Beach’s public programming for the first time ever. The selection of 3-minute video works will be projected nightly from December 4th to December 6th at SoundScape Park, a 2.5-acre urban park in the cultural and civic heart of Miami Beach. The free open-air program will feature 30 artworks on rotation each evening by past Midnight Moment artists, including Nick Cave, Lu Yang, Ori Gersht, Erin Johnson, Tali Keren and Alex Strada, Federico Solmi, Carolina Caycedo, Kambui Olujimi, as well as Laurie Simmons’ newest video work.
ABOUT LAURIE SIMMONS
Laurie Simmons is an internationally recognized artist. Since the mid-70s, she has staged scenes for her camera, creating images with intensely psychological subtexts and nonlinear narratives. By the early 1980s, Simmons was at the forefront of a new generation of artists, predominantly women, whose use of photography began a new dialogue in contemporary art. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the Hara Museum in Tokyo; and the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam, among others. In 2018–19 her retrospective Big Camera/Little Camera was presented at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 2006 she produced and directed her first film, The Music of Regret, starring Meryl Streep, Adam Guettel and the Alvin Ailey 2 Dancers. The film premiered at the Museum of Modern Art. Her feature film MY ART premiered at the 73rd Venice Film Festival and Tribeca Film festival in 2017. Simmons lives and works in New York and Connecticut.
ABOUT TIMES SQUARE ARTS
Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, collaborates with contemporary artists and cultural institutions to experiment and engage with one of the world's most iconic urban places. Through the Square's electronic billboards, public plazas, vacant areas and popular venues, and the Alliance's own online landscape, Times Square Arts invites leading contemporary creators, such as Charles Gaines, Joan Jonas, Jeffrey Gibson, Pamela Council, Mel Chin and Kehinde Wiley, to help the public see Times Square in new ways. Times Square has always been a cultural district and place of risk, innovation and creativity, and the arts program ensures these qualities remain central to the district's unique identity.
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