When you're getting ready, you finally reach a point where your clothes are right and your hair and makeup are right, and you're not comparing yourself to anyone. It's a really great moment. Then you get to the party and it's like, "Oh my god, I'm wearing the wrong thing! I'm garish!" or "I'm underdressed!"

Oh god, success is so exhausting.

I feel like I spent so much time trying to understand my identity and my identity as an artist. But when all is said and done, at this age, I feel the most like I felt when I was 11. And all those talents I had when I was 11 and 12 - I'm letting them sort of happen again. I can't speak for men, but for women - we go back to a kind of pre-adolescent state when we were superfree and supercool.

I'm very interested in stopping time. And starting time. There is that aspect of time that I'm playing with, that it's elusive and unnoticed yet really in the end the most important thing.

I use people that are close to me, like a studio assistant or a friend, someone I know who's going to really enjoy it. It's important to me to have men inside there, too, because so many dollers are men. It's putting me into a pretty odd headspace, the shooting, because I understand the motivation of these dollers to dress up. There's a way that you start to prefer the reality of that world to your own world. It's so much more beautiful.

The challenge has always been to wrest emotion out of a doll face that we think of as only having one emotion. It's moving a light, moving my camera; it's just this mental investment that I make, and suddenly, everything changes.

When you're getting ready, you finally reach a point where your clothes are right and your hair and makeup are right, and you're not comparing yourself to anyone. It's a really great moment. Then you get to the party and it's like, "Oh my god, I'm wearing the wrong thing! I'm garish!" or "I'm underdressed!"