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In the fantastic land of Tlön (a region described in the literature of the people living in the likewise fictional country of Uqbar), reality is never directly addressed. To illustrate this trait, one has only to consider the Tlönese language, in which nouns are obsolete: a thing can only be referred to by describing its appearance or its action.
Similarly, Simon Mee's bizarre, painted toy-catalogue, feels its way around reality. Whilst depicting toys and cartoon characters either as nature mortes or as stills from an animated filmstrip, Mee manages to address the grand classical themes of violence, death, pleasure and innocence. His is an indirect study of those issues which are most pertinent to humans, although this obliqueness does not permit objectivity. Victimisation and viciousness do not simply vaporize into clever puns and rib-digging 'in-jokes'. Here they are acutely felt through the intermediations and intimacy of the toys themselves.
When performed by rubber figurines and jointed kewpie dolls, it is to be expected that the most banal acts should seem somewhat laughable. However, in this latest series of dramatised dioramas, Mee omits the common-place and focuses on aspects of human immorality. How odd, that we can only appreciate the true horror of these tableaux, when they are acted out in this heightened theatre of the absurd. Perversely however, these amoral acts are really found in bounteous quantity: sensationalised in the tabloid press and serialised on our televisions. And yet it is just this saturation which appeals to Mee. In viewing his works, we simultaneously see how desensitised we are to such violence, how appalling it is to witness similar acts in the sanctified realm of youthful innocence (and yet how