IMPORT EXPORT is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by Laurie Simmons, the legendary New York artist whose five-decade career spans photography, film, sculpture and most recently, painting. Uncanny Valley brings together Simmons's AI-assisted body of work: the Autofiction films and the Autofiction: My Collaborator image series. The exhibition opens on the occasion of the 2026 edition of Warsaw Gallery Weekend.
Born in 1949 in Queens, New York, Simmons began taking photographs at age six, when her father gave her a Brownie camera. After earning her BFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, she moved to New York's SoHo neighborhood in the mid-1970s. Around that time she acquired a collection of 1950s antique dolls and began staging them under dramatic lighting, building scenes charged with psychological subtext and nonlinear narratives. She continued staging interiors, props, and live models through photographs and films throughout her career.
By the 1980s, Simmons stood at the forefront of a generation of artists — predominantly women — using photography to open a new dialogue with mass media. Her work is singular, yet sits squarely alongside contemporaries such as Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Louise Lawler, the American arm of the Pictures Generation, who brought framing, staging, and the visual language of mass media into fine art.
Across her career, Simmons has returned to themes of domesticity, intimacy, security, gender role ascription, and authenticity, filtering them through modernity, nostalgia, and estrangement. Her images use props, architectural models, interiors with designer furniture, doll figures and sometimes real models. Each staged scene intentionally provokes a surreal affect, giving a feeling described by some viewers as the "uncanny valley."
“Uncanny Valley” originated in 1970 with Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, who used it to describe the unease people feel toward hyper realistic dolls, mannequins, wax figures, and humanoids — anything that looks almost, but not quite, human. It has found new relevance with the rise of AI.
Simmons extends her lifelong inquiry into the real and the uncanny in Autofiction, her recent work with an AI model she calls her “new collaborator.” The images in Autofiction: My Collaborator began as text prompts, written by the artist, fed to a model that she trained on five decades of her photography archive. Simmons then edited each image by hand, curating and finishing them until she was satisfied with the familiar, yet estranged, results.
The Autofiction films follow the same logic: Simmons prompted AI to construct real and imagined scenes from her own life, where a shape-shifting cast of women moves through domestic interiors, indoor pools, city centers, and open roads with an eerie, dream-like quality. She edited each film, often adding narration and music.
Together, the two bodies of work push Simmons's decades-long practice of mining personal memory and interrogating domesticity, gender roles, and artifice into new territory — one where authorship and collaboration, memory and speculation, past and future blend into one.
"I was used to collaborating with toymakers, makeup artists, body painters, and Photoshop editors," Simmons says. "I love the way this new work finds a space between painting, photography, drawing and sculpture."
Uncanny Valley by Laurie Simmons will be on view at IMPORT EXPORT in Warsaw from 18 September until 31 October 2026.
