How We See, 2015–2017
For the ongoing series How We See, begun in 2015, Simmons has been working with make-up artists to paint open eyes on women’s closed eyelids, rendering them surreal, like doll’s eyes. Both How We See and The Love Doll, 2009–11, address gender roles and the obsession with perfectionism as it relates to women. In each, women can ask how we see ourselves in relationship to such fantasized versions of femininity—be they entirely fake or simply with fake eyes. The life-size dolls and doll-like women of Simmons’s recent series point to the absurdities of role-playing or looking the part, recalling so much of her early work, including Clothes Make the Man and the Jane images.