Let's get this embarrassing admission out of the way: I have more than a passing knowledge of LC, Heidi, Spencer, Audrina and Co. The frivolous interpersonal dramas of these reality MTV personalities have taken up their fair share of time on my television, and televisions of a million-some other viewers of "The Hills" each week. The shallow plot lines — boyfriend-stealing, relationship-cheating and general responsibility-thwarting — do nothing to disguise the show's base concept, an advertorial for a specific Southern Californian blend of affluence, youth and beauty. These themes draw in audiences, fascinated by a life they may know only vicariously through the carefully crafted "reality" television provides.

Artist Kirsten Rae Simonsen uses "The Hills" as one jumping-off point for a new exhibition of her work titled "Luxury Playtime: Welcome to the New Lifestyle." Borrowing titles from episodes of "The Hills," she creates a series of young women frozen in portrait. These women, rendered in gesso, acrylic, pencil, watercolor pencil and fine charcoal on wood panel, pose their flat, unmodeled bodies self-consciously at the viewer.

In "You Know What You Did," a young woman sits with hand to cheek, vaguely scowling at some thought. Disdain is more overt in "With Friends Like These ..." where the female subject cocks her shoulders and looks straight at the viewer, one eyebrow raised. In each panel, the women are dressed in white, on clean white backgrounds, as if the figures themselves serve as canvases for the single piece of jewelry, ribbon, floral accent and/or small animal with which they often accessorize.

Simonsen, who titles the series "Luxury Playtime," after an advertisement she recently saw in China, takes inspiration from a laundry list of pop culture sources. Her emphasis on accessories both living and man-made, the flatness of the composition and the vacancy of the characters can be traced to Simonsen's interest in Shanghai cigarette ads from the 1930s, traditional Chinese flower and bird paintings, the film "Breakfast at Tiffany's," fashion magazines of the 1950s to present, and contemporary Chinese ads for luxury items such as fine wine and cigars imported from the West. Taken as a whole, Simonsen's series works to interrogate the cultural tendency to view young beautiful women as complacent and perhaps complicit objects of material adornment.

"Luxury Playtime" works are paired with a second series by Simonsen titled "Suburban Promises." Interspersed with the panels of female figures are similarly sized white panels that each contains several lines of oversize, loopy, saccharine handwriting. "You seem like a real unique and interesting person and I hope you remain so," states one panel with a hint of subtext. "You're really sweet & I hope u never change," exclaims another. Change, it seems clear, is the enemy.

Simonsen has appropriated these notes from the pages of her own suburban Chicago high school yearbook. Written from one girl to another, they speak to a collective value system shared by these girls. Much like the young women of "Luxury Playtime," the original authors of the "Suburban Promises" inscriptions offer only the most shallow of glimpses into the world which they inhabit.

The Korean artist Do Ho Suh used his high school yearbook to splice source material for a composite self-portrait. More recently, Vancouver-based artist Karin Buba created a much-blogged-about series of pastel drawings based on stills from "The Hills." However, Simonsen's careful editing of text and image works to question gender roles in a way that none of her precedents do.

In a culture where affluence, youth and beauty reign supreme, "Luxury Playtime: Welcome to the New Lifestyle" hints at an underlying sadness and longing for something that, while always on the horizon, can never quite be grasped.