Strip marquee showcases artist’s videos

If you’ve ever driven the Strip, it’s happened to you.

That descent into trapped-in-traffic limbo, where you have no choice but to stare at the casino marquees, their giant light-emitting diode screens touting everything from hot slots to showroom headliners.

Depending on the time you drive by, however, there’s something different glimmering on The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas’ 65-foot marquee. Two different somethings.

One looks like a dancing doll who sashays and sways, blows a kiss, waves and otherwise rocks out to the electronic beat of iPhone ringtones.

The other resembles a traditional Japanese geisha, complete with formal kimono and headdress, whose expressionless face presents a decided contrast to the 1930 tune that accompanies her image: “Falling in love again, never wanted to, what am I to do? Can’t help it.”

They’re the stars of two videos — 2014’s “Ringtone” and 2011’s “Geisha Song” — created by New York-based artist and photographer Laurie Simmons. (She’s hardly the only creative one in the family; her husband Carroll Dunham is a painter and their daughter, Lena Dunham, is the creator, writer, director and star of HBO’s “Girls.”)

Simmons’ two videos, on hourly display on The Cosmopolitan’s outdoor and indoor signs, are part of the PAUSE public art project (in partnership with the Art Production Fund) that transforms digital screens into large-scale canvases.

For Simmons, the large scale of The Cosmopolitan’s marquee — and its Strip location — heighten the intrigue of the project.

“I wonder what people will think,” she says in a recent telephone interview.

Observers might not “be quite sure what these images are” and “might not know” they’re part of an art presentation, Simmons says. “I like that confusion.”

Simmons also says she loves the idea that the work that she made gets all mixed up with ads for casinos. She says she was tremendously drawn to Las Vegas’ visual overload. (Simmons likens it to Tokyo’s Shibuya district, with its hundreds of billboards with animated characters.)

“(Being) in the center of the blinking lights,” Simmons says, “I feel really great.”

The public nature of The Cosmopolitan’s video displays also means bringing her art to audiences who might find a gallery setting “slightly intimidating,” she says. After all, “a gallery is a pretty rarefied situation.”

But there’s nothing rarefied about hundreds of pedestrians (not to mention all those gridlock-blocked drivers) pondering Simmons’ images on The Cosmopolitan’s towering marquee.

“I like thinking about that moment” when “head-scratching tourists” experience “Ringtone” and “Geisha Song” for themselves, she says. “I wonder what happens” in their minds.

Although both videos display Simmons’ perspective, each has a very different mood, she says.

The dancing star of “Ringtone” may look like a doll, but it’s really a woman wearing a mask, says Simmons, whose recent work has featured Kigurumi, a form of costume-play performance art in which participants dress in masks and bodysuits.

(Simmons’ next show, “How We See” — opening in March at New York City’s Jewish Museum — depicts the “Doll Girls” subculture, focusing on women who alter themselves to look like Barbies, baby dolls and Japanese anime characters through makeup, costumes and even cosmetic surgery.)

The Kigurumi figure in “Ringtone” occupies a strange space between doll and human, she artist says.

Unlike “Ringtone,” the 2011 video “Geisha Song” does feature a real doll — a lifelike latex one Simmons says she has photographed a lot, notably in her 2009 series “The Love Doll.”

But the “Geisha Song” video, she says, conjures a much more nostalgic mood, with its use of the rueful “Falling in Love Again.” (The singer featured on the video is Eureka Matsukawa, but the song is forever associated with silver-screen legend Marlene Dietrich — who surely sang it during her Vegas headliner days in the 1950s.)

Simmons says having her images displayed on a Las Vegas marquee seems entirely appropriate.

“For me, I’ve always felt like, within the center of that artifice is a kind of hyper-reality,” she says.

“If you simply showed a masked woman or a real geisha,” it wouldn’t have the same impact, Simmons says. “In dealing with artifice, we really take more time to reconstruct it. Is this real or is it not real? And if it’s not, what is it? I feel I grab my viewer that way.”

Simmons has been grabbing viewers with her artfully composed images since the late 1970s. (You can check out her projects, including “Ringtone” and “Geisha Song,” on her website, www.lauriesimmons.net.)

Some of her photographs feature dolls and dollhouse furniture; others depict household objects (from books to perfume bottles) with human-looking legs. Ventriloquist’s dummies populate some of her pictures, while the musical short “The Music of Regret” stars vintage puppets — and Meryl Streep.

Simmons is now planning to shoot a full-length movie, “My Art,” about a woman artist around her age (she’s 65) who’s discovering her work and herself.

Besides writing and directing, Simmons will star, but there’s also a part for her daughter Lena. (That seems only fair, considering how Simmons has appeared in “Girls” — and in Dunham’s award-winning 2010 big-screen breakthrough, “Tiny Furniture.”)

Speaking of big screens, Simmons’ PAUSE project represents her Las Vegas debut, but it’s hardly the first time she’s explored Neon Nirvana’s artistic possibilities.

Simmons’ 1985 “Tourism” series features small plastic figurines (the kind that used to populate kids’ dollhouses) photographed in front of backdrops depicting landmarks around the world, from Stonehenge to the Great Wall of China.

Las Vegas also turns up on Simmons’ “Tourism” itinerary, represented by such now-vanished Strip mainstays as the Stardust and the Silver Slipper.

“That was way before I ever saw the Strip” in person, she says. “I was so excited when I finally got there.”

Contact reporter Carol Cling at ccling@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272. Follow @CarolSCling on Twitter.