“Being an artist was a great excuse for anything you wanted to do that was ‘different’ ”, says the artist, photographer and filmmaker Laurie Simmons, whose work is the subject of a major retrospective survey now closing at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and opening at the MCA in Chicago on February 21.

In this episode, she talks to host Charlotte Burns about everything from internet culture to egalitarian art and the concept of magical thinking. Simmons’s tableaus, which are often created with dolls, explore memory, sexuality and artifice and she discusses what it was (and is) like working in a male-dominated industry.