Autofiction: My Collaborator is a series of fifteen new works by Laurie Simmons. Using an AI model trained on five decades of her work, Simmons prompted the system with her own texts, generating images that reimagined her archive from a machine's perspective. She then selected, altered, and hand-finished each output, folding them back into her practice. The compositions feel unmistakably hers, yet are strangely displaced: a machine's reading of an artistic life, reabsorbed by its author.

The series extends questions that have shaped Simmons' practice since the late 1970s, when she emerged as part of the Pictures Generation, which included Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince among many others. From her early tableaux of dolls, puppets, and human stand-ins, she has long explored the gap between the artificial and the authentic. Her subjects, substitutes for the human, expose how identity is shaped from the outside: by advertising, film, television, and domestic fantasy. The staged scene has always been her means of revealing how real life is scripted.

In Autofiction: My Collaborator, the non-human agent becomes the first image-maker. The AI outputs are not imitations but uncanny recombinations: familiar motifs (surrogate figures, constructed interiors, bodies of water, theatrical mise-en-scène) resurface in unfamiliar configurations. The works turn on the tension between authorship and collaboration, memory and estrangement, past and future.