From early in her artistic career, Laurie Simmons turned to dolls, toys, mannequins, and ventriloquist dummies as surrogates through which to speak. Her Love Doll series features a life-size, latex, anatomically correct “Real Love Doll” discovered by the artist during an extended stay in Japan in 2009. Recalling her earlier photographs staged in dollhouses, this later series, in which Simmons effectively turned her own home into a human-size dollhouse, blurs the distinction between fiction and reality. In this series, childhood doll-play collides with an eerie and somewhat disturbing sexual innuendo.