Laurie Simmons' early photographs were oddly poignant documents of dolls at home, awkwardly busying themselves in the furnished, wallpapered rooms of their dollhouses. She has photographed dolls strolling in the foreground of unnatural habitats, rear projected slide images of exotic locales. And she has photographed teenage models, precociously jaded young women posed as rigidly as the inarticulate dolls. Although Simmons' photographs have characters and settings, the narrative seems to have been lost when the dolls left the house. The later photographs are static and purposefully fake, a record of no-one visiting nowhere. In recent years, Allan McCollum has produced not paintings but their "plaster surrogates," plaster casts indicating a frame, a mat, and a black centre. They function as stage props, stand-ins for paintings. McCollum also takes photographs of television and newspaper images in which pictures resembling the surrogates appear in the background. In this way he fabricates a history for the vacant little surrogates. The "Actual Photos" are a conflation of McCollum and Simmons' interests. Louise Bogan has written that "All objects await human sympathy. It is only the human that can humanize." By choosing to photograph these tiny dolls, McCollum and Simmons have endowed these objects with a strangely winning humanity.

--Susan Morgan
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