Laurie Simmons X David Bers
Laurie Simmons X David Bers
Biography
Laurie Simmons on FlashCube*
“When amateur photography exploded in the USA, my father bought Brownie Cameras for my two sisters and me. They hung around our necks like brown plastic necklaces with long brown cords. We understood that we should take pictures of the world around us—to document vacations, parties, friendships, holidays, graduations, weddings—all of life’s so-called ‘Kodak Moments.” Those pictures, developed by the local pharmacy, were cataloged in albums to be opened periodically, reminding us of these milestones. I still have all my albums, from the pale pink leatherette books to the more tasteful covers. I have my parents’ albums along with my grandparents’ pictures, a jumble of physical evidence of the obsession to narrate one’s life through images. Point-and-shoot cameras feel like a comforting relic from a simpler time, along with the reassuring pop clunk sound the flash cube made when the light was low. One needed only to learn how to load a roll of film to become an expert. All the simple Kodak cameras represented a portal to the future and a way to feel a longing for an edited past.
David Bers and I have been trading thoughts on art, architecture and design since 2007. While our collaborative ideas sometimes start as architectural plans, they often evolve and change in the moment through conversation and spontaneous research. I find he both thinks like an artist and thinks out loud, making it easy for me to follow his often colliding trains of thought.We’ve collaborated on art installations, furnishings, home renovations and most recently he built a house for my daughter, from the ground up where we joined forces on interior design.
We’ve always shared a crazy love of lamps and illumination and FlashCube is our first joint lighting project.” – Laurie Simmons
Learn More About Laurie Simmons
David Bers on FlashCube*
“Laurie’s and my past discussions have mostly surrounded the gravity of objects and elements of design, their signifiers, and how memory effects perceptions of design. I find this inseparable from the design process, and Laurie is clearly speaking this language. So we’re starting from shared creative ground. This piece is the point of these intersections.
In modeling a camera I move toward the far edge of recognition with the design tools most intuitive to me like materiality, tactility, and proportion. Just as Laurie brings radiant colors and unexpected juxtapositions to bear in her art.
Before the smartphone, we all remember our first cameras. They usually came as a gift and they were always magic. As a child of the 1970s, mine was the Pocket Instamatic.
We‘ve had many discussion wondering if viewers would “get” the camera. The pocket instamatic was such a technological and cultural flash in the pan. For people of a specific age group it’s a very dear icon, and for others slightly younger or older, it’s not really recognizable.
In the end it is a beautiful, seductive, reductive image of stone, light and crystal. And for some, a memorial to pop culture, and dead technology.” – David Bers