Although the characters in Laurel Hausler’s paintings are almost always dead or soon-to-be-dead, her paintings are more poignant and cheeky than macabre. Death is not so much scary for them as befuddling. Her characters often seem surprised to find themselves on their side of the divide, and many of them seem to have only themselves to blame for it—like maybe they poked something with a stick that shouldn’t have been poked. Rather than being threatening, they seem sad, lost and in need of a hug. Think Charles Addams, Edward Gorey and Tim Burton, not Wes Craven or Stephen King.

Hausler’s work is a product of her own attempts to demystify and make less scary the thing that scares almost all of us the most. Somewhere between the afterlife she was taught about in Catholic school and the world inhabited by Hollywood’s zombies and monsters, she has imagined a world of rather simple "living" that seems more-or-less normal to those who are in it. They almost make it seem like death is no big deal.

Hausler has focused recently on photography, documenting the adventures of dolls that she has rescued from hobby shops and eBay. She views these works as "painting with photographs," a process that allows her to "look at the color and blur of the final image as more of a fantastic scene than a snapshot." In the new works, she places her heroines in worlds outside the dollhouse—worlds that are as strange to them as the netherworld is to us. She follows them as they trek through rain-soaked forests and treacherous weed fields, bringing them to life with her lens. The dolls look so vulnerable and innocent in these strange surroundings that we feel human compassion for what are obviously inanimate objects.

Laurel Hausler is self-taught. She lives and works as a full-time artist in Northern Virginia, where she grew up, just outside Washington, DC.