[9][10] Often noted for its humor and pathos, her art explores boundaries such as between artifice and truth or private and public, while raising questions about the construction of identity, tropes of prosperity, consumerism and domesticity, and practices of self-presentation and image-making.

[11][12][13] In a review of Simmons's 2019 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, critic Steve Johnson wrote, "Collectively—and with a sly but barbed sense of humor—[her works] challenge you to think about what, if anything, is real: in our gender roles, and our cultural assumptions, and our perceptions of others.

[20][15][43] In her career spanning more than four decades, Simmons has used the camera to explore psycho-social subtexts involving gender, social convention, identity and cultural aspiration, often by considering ways that objects are humanized and people—particularly women—are objectified.

[15][41] Central to her work are visual contrivances such as manipulation of scale and photography's capacity to deceive, inanimate human surrogates, which mediate subjects, creating a sense of remove and disjuncture often described as uncanny and unsettling.

[4][39] According to New York Times critic Ken Johnson, "Simmons is counted as a core member of the Pictures Generation, whose appropriations, manipulations and simulations of various photographic genres profoundly altered the course of late-20th-century art.

[3][1] Critics particularly connect Simmons's work with that of New York contemporaries Cindy Sherman and Sarah Charlesworth, whose photography also made use of personal and collective memory, pop culture and everyday objects in order to restage, rework or subvert socio-cultural constructions.

[56][4][44] Her small dollhouse images often presented a solitary miniature plastic housewife in mundane domestic scenarios—organizing food, preparing a bath or watching television in pristine spaces—that offered a simultaneously nostalgic and critical view of idealized, 1950s American femininity and suburban conformity.

[31][38][57][6] Assessing them later, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman wrote, "the mood is wry, ad hoc and bittersweet, the feminist message neither obscure nor didactic … Her gifts for light, pattern and color and for making catchy images disproportionate to their modest size are nowhere more apparent than in these photographs.

[17][15] In her post-2000 projects, Simmons moved toward human subjects and greater emotional starkness, extending recurrent themes of dolls, artifice, public and private to include social media practices of constructing, disseminating and obscuring images of the self.

[7][45][9] Combining an ambiguous mix of scale and styles—intense colors, discordant fabrics, askew paintings and kitschy accessories—the images depicted dramatic scenarios (cooking, sex, slumber parties) that ARTnews critic Hilarie Sheets called "glossy, over-the-top retro fantasies of domestic desirability.

[69][70] Set in a real domestic world (Simmons's home) that had a normalizing effect underplaying the sexual element, the series privileged the doll's emotional life as a kind of "Everygirl"[68] engaged in casual moments of undisturbed innocence.

"[67] Simmons made the transition to human models in two photographic series influenced by kigurumi, a Japanese costume play subculture in which participants become doll-like characters through masks, bodysuits, make-up or surgery.

[71][72][73] The oversize "How We See" portraits (2015) depicted young women in yearbook-like poses against bright curtains, with radiant light catching strangely vacant eyes that were actually trompe l'oeil illusions painted onto their closed eyelids.

"[13] As with the doll masks, the process removed the models' sight leaving them vulnerable—an effect critics interpreted variously as commentary on the objectification of women, the opacity and risk of online identities, or the unreliability of assumptions about perception, self-presentation and portraiture.

[9][79][80] The acts include a dark-wigged Meryl Streep portraying a speed dater (and Simmons surrogate) being courted by male ventriloquist dummies and the Alvin Ailey dancers embodying her "Walking Objects" female archetypes in a heartbreaking, Chorus Line-like audition.

[1][2][5] While different in character, Ellie's art—meticulous, DIY feminist recreations of Hollywood scenes in which she subs for Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich and others—shares concerns with Simmons's work involving artifice, fantasy, reality and women's roles.

[85][10][2] Eve MacSweeney of Vogue called the film "a devastatingly funny and subtle lens on such subjects as success, ageism, loneliness, absurdity, dating in your 60s, inhibition and disinhibition, collaboration, and ruthlessness.