In the mid-nineteen-seventies, this influential artist began her career by photographing shadowy doll-house interiors. The small, jewel-toned pieces in her new show, “Color Pictures/Deep Photos,” recall those uncanny scenes—with some notable differences. The photo-collage works on view are windows into an X-rated, Lilliputian world of nude, often masturbating female figures (images that the artist downloaded from amateur-porn sites) populating strange domestic spaces. When she started the long-simmering project, in 2007, Simmons planned to present it as a series of large photos. But, this year, she landed on a novel approach, setting the pictures in shadow-box frames and pouring clear resin over them, resulting in a sticky, hard-candy look. Miniature objects—a ceiling light fixture, a pink bathroom sink—often emerge from the surfaces, their toylike presence acting as an unsettling foil to the adult content. Sometimes male artists haunt the compositions, too. Trapped in resin, images of Jackson Pollock’s libidinal splatters and Walt Disney’s observant gaze mingle with the women’s come-hither poses, delivering an extra jolt of irony into Simmons’s distillation of feminism and fantasy.
