Taryn Simon

Taryn Simon’s practice features rigorous research and an extensive engagement with archives, which help the artist explore systems of power. Her subjects have included bloodlines, the structure of the criminal justice system, and flower arrangements from photographs of political signings. Simon explores these interests in taxonomic photographs, text works, sculptures, films, and performances that critique long-standing institutions and the ways art has supported them. The Innocents (2002), for example, documents wrongful conviction cases in the United States and considers how photography and mistaken identification can undermine criminal justice efforts. For An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007), Simon photographed traditionally out-of-sight objects and spaces—from a braille edition of Playboy to the CIA’s art collection—that she believed to be foundational to American mythologies. Simon’s work belongs in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate.