Mariel Clayton

I recently recalled an artist I stumbled across online a few years ago.  Mariel Clayton is a photographer who works with a couple of well-known characters, Barbie and Ken.  She has a playful outlook on her often dark and gruesome subject matter, as she subverts the bubbly portrayal of Barbie and her sometimes-boyfriend Ken (near-sociopathic in its detachment from reality).  Clayton's work tells stories in single frames, and the stories are rarely pretty.  I think perhaps the best way to explain her work is to show it:

In Clayton's photographs of the typically utopian world of Barbie and Ken, the viewer is treated to every day unpleasantness, abuse, murder, sexual depravity, suicide, and a host of other jarring themes.  More than anything, I'm fascinated by her ability to imply such a thick and disturbed narrative in a single image, frequently with only one or two characters, and with distinct limitations of expression and pose.
(Needless to say she has some other work too-- still with the dolls, but a little bit more typically aesthetic rather than the freakish stories she seems most interested in)

Here's the link to her website with a host of her work:
Mariel Clayton 

And here's an extremely interesting article in which she discusses it quite candidly:
Bad Barbie: The Works of Mariel Clayton