Café of the Inner Mind, 1994
Turning again to masculinity, Simmons created three series featuring male ventriloquist dummies that she designed and commissioned. In the photographic series Café of the Inner Mind, 1994, Simmons gives personality to the dummies by staging them with thought bubbles that reveal their private desires. “Café was the first time I explored narrative to this degree—I wanted to show what the dummies’ inner lives would be. Projecting internal thoughts got me into storytelling.” More progressively narrative, the men are seen daydreaming about food, straight sex, gay sex, a mother—as random as anyone’s thoughts plausibly can be. We as viewers can access their personal musings, but they are not privy to each other’s mental states.
In Men’s Room, 1994, three dolls are seen in a men’s restroom—a place symbolic of down-and-dirty sex acts. Two of the dummies fantasize about women and the other daydreams about men. Reduced to the one-dimensional idea that men are always thinking of sex, the scene is at once humorous and unflattering. Yet, it somehow touches on empathy, perhaps because we know it takes a human to animate the dolls; actual people stand behind the dummies, which are traditionally alter egos of the comedians who operate them.