The works of Bod Mellor (b. 1970, United Kingdom) deconstruct the cult of celebrity through dark humor, breaking the identification between actor, character, and viewer. The over-saturated archetypes of characters on television are given new life through surreal symbols: in one painting, snails crawl with their slime across the face of an elderly prison officer; in another, a jail guard’s face is literally adorned with two toilets; elsewhere, a custodian’s face is superimposed with plastic chairs arranged in a circle, recalling AA meetings. This series of paintings stages a narrative among ten prison guards from various British crime series, revealing the strange tension between their banal gestures and exaggerated features. The apparent ordinariness of their expressions might evoke teams in other institutional settings—a university, a hospital, or a school—yet the deliberate clustering of portraits creates a sense of constant surveillance, reflecting the pervasive gaze that defines prison life.