Laurie Simmons talks juggling her roles as an artist and the mother of a famous daughter

Widely known for her photos of dollhouse figures, ventriloquist dummies and objects on legs, Laurie Simmons has been a New York art-scene fixture since the mid-1970s. Now, the Jewish Museum is presenting her latest series, “How We See,” featuring models with trompe l’oeil eyes painted on their closed lids—uncanny images that question our assumptions about portraiture. Here, Simmons talks about her art and how it’s affected her daughter, Lena Dunham.

Your work prior to this involved images of cos-play participants dressing up like anime figures, and before that, you created another group of photos, featuring an extremely lifelike Japanese love doll. Are you particularly fascinated by Japan?
There’s an infantile edge to Japan’s visual culture that I like. You can’t walk down the street without seeing billboards of cartoons and hearing squeaky voices and finding stores full of thousands of little objects. I couldn’t get out of some of the stores, because I kept picking up things that I wanted to shoot. I find it interesting that the first thing that I took away was a life-size love doll, because there were so many small things that really attracted my attention.

It’s interesting that you say this, because for most of your career, you were known for using small objects and figures, and it appears that the love-doll and cos-player images opened you up to working on a human scale.
Well, yeah, they gave me a way to work with human beings. And because in both I started to uses existing scenarios, such as furniture in my own house or a tree outside, the world suddenly turned into my stage set.

Let’s get to the photos you’re showing at the Jewish Museum. How would you describe them?
The title “How We See” says it all: how we see, what we see, how we present ourselves. I tried to find some way to interfere/interrupt all of that, and the painted eyes gave me just the jolt of artifice I needed.

Are you trying to make the figures look like statues?
I want them to seem artificial, even though they’re not. The further away I get from them being obviously human, the more comfortable I am. I love it when they look sculptural.

How did you find your models?
It was kind of organic. Some people in the fashion industry helped me to find them, and along the way, I met people interested in working on the project. There’s a lot of diversity. Two of them are transgender, for instance.

How did you decide on the clothing and makeup?
The clothing is by one designer, Rachel Antonoff. The makeup artists chose how to do the eyes. I didn’t put any restrictions on what anyone could do, so it was like inviting another set of artists to collaborate with me.

What about the selection of background colors?
I’d been thinking a lot about Warhol colors, Warhol backgrounds. We think of them as being bright primary colors, but they are really odd colors, which attracted me. I kept mixing lights and gels to find these slightly off, somewhat acidic colors.

Does social media ever impact your thinking?
Sometimes I’m afraid that, in terms of digital culture, I’ve gone to the dark side. I used to think of it as my second language, but I don’t feel that as much anymore. I guess that’s partly because I want to know what my daughters and their friends are up to, and so much of that is on Twitter, Instagram, blogs, et cetera. I sometimes wonder if I’m too conversant with all of that for someone my age. The possibilities for engaging in social media, and inadvertently stepping in shit, are endless. I worry that young artists will be afraid to speak up knowing there is a constant chorus of critics and naysayers out there. Of course, I worry too much.

I suppose you get asked this a lot, but do you think your art influenced Lena?
I hope that it’s been good for her, growing up around artists. There were no dinner-table conversations about career, so she would’ve learned by observing. I hope that finding my own voice helped her. She’s said that she always assumed she was expected to pick a job she loved.

How do you deal with the negative criticism directed at her?
I’ve turned off my Google alert—it’s really the only sane thing to do.

"Laurie Simmons: How We See" opens Fri 13 at the Jewish Museum.