The fantastical and wryly comical videos, animatronic sculptures, and installations by Los Angeles– and Amsterdam-based artist Nathaniel Mellors, employ absurdist satire to incisively critique morality, national identity, religion, and power structures in contemporary society. Conflating cinematic tropes and methods from television sitcoms, theater, science fiction, mythology, and anthropology, Mellors writes the scripts for each of his projects, which he also directs, edits, and produces. Using the Upper Paleolithic period as a lens through which to view the present, Mellors’s recent works typically feature the Neanderthal, a species of early human that was until recently considered inferior to “modern” Homo sapiens—and incapable of making art, a marker of human intelligence.