James Bantone’s multidisciplinary artistic research approaches the body not as a vessel of selfhood, but as an image shaped by systems of display, replication, and control. This inquiry unfolds in his sculpture Child’s Play 02 (2022). As in other works, Bantone employs the mannequin as a metaphor for the dynamics of reification and commodification to which bodies are subjected today, transforming the figure into both a mirror and a counterfeit of the human form. In Child’s Play 02, the processes of representation and manipulation are stripped down to their basic elements. The work dissects and distorts social and narrative codes, opening space for new formal and relational configurations. Through the disintegration of the body, here sewn up, dressed, and blinded by the ever-present black, a blank form emerges. The work acquires a melancholic charge, inviting projections of an idealized self-image and reminding us that the presentation of the self can be as self-effacing as it is self-affirming.