The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents a major retrospective of works by Laurie Simmons (American, b. 1949). The exhibition showcases the artist’s career-long exploration of archetypal gender roles through photographs, sculptures, and films that span the last four decades, from 1976 to the present.

The comprehensive exhibition surveys nearly all of Simmons’s major series, including the iconic Walking & Lying Objects, begun in 1987, which features dancers wearing larger-than-life props as costumes that hide their torsos but reveal their legs. The poses create personified objects and objectified people, demonstrating how our culture defines, fetishizes, and flattens bodies—especially the female body—and material things. For one of her latest bodies of work, How We See (2015–ongoing), Simmons hired makeup artists to paint open eyes on her sitters’ closed eyelids. Inverting her usual practice by making real people appear uncannily artificial, Simmons addresses what she describes as “our longings, yearnings, and vulnerabilities” within the often-superficial world of social media

In addition to its strong feminist stance, Simmons’s work also upends traditional ideas about photography as a medium. The namesake image for this exhibition, Big Camera/Little Camera (1976), shows an actual camera juxtaposed with a miniature camera, which exemplifies Simmons’s technique of manipulating scale.

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