The Love Doll, 2009–11
Simmons’s series The Love Doll, 2009–11, moves away from 1950s dolls and props in miniature to contemporary, life-size dolls that are staged in real-life settings. Unlike Jane and the early figurines that activate nostalgia, the scaled-to-life dolls, though generic, incite empathy through the implied, yet unresolved, narratives Simmons stages, while they also convey messages of ideal beauty and the intricacies of the politics of sexuality. Layering more artifice onto an already fabricated female archetype, Simmons presents several ironies: the pictures are fake scenarios of surrogate objects made to look like women, who are the true objects of male fantasy. Their blank stares suggest that they are in various states of reverie—dreamy, yet in reality empty.