Wednesday Artist: Taryn Simon

I think a lot about how we grapple with loss

and this kind of human commitment to leaving

a mark of something that is otherwise visible.

~ Taryn Simon

A multidisciplinary artist of research-based work, Taryn Simon is especially interested in systems of classifications and categorizations, and how we perceive, judge, manipulate, alter, and gain understanding of what is hidden and secret and "ever morphing" in our most "foundational spaces" of knowledge, such as religion, security, and law. Her investigations often involve both image (photograph) and text and "this dance between" the two where "there's instability of fact". In the video below, produced in October 2016 for the Louisiana Channel, Simon, interviewed by Marc-Chrisoph Wagner at her New York City studio, seeks to articulate her conceptual framework and artistic process.

The subject of numerous essays on art, Simon, a Guggenheim Fellow who also works in sculpture, film and video, and performance, exhibits internationally in such institutions as London's Tate Modern, Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, and New York City's Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. Her project Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015) appeared at the United Nations and Gagosian Gallery in New York City in September 2016; earlier that same year it was exhibited in Rome.  Her work An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007) is on view in an exhibition with the same title through January 15, 2017, at Denmark's Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; the special exhibition "A Soldier is Taught to Bayonet the Enemy and not Some Undefined Abstraction" can be seen through January 15, 2017, at Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden, Germany.

Simon's work can be found in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others.

Taryn Simon at Gagosian Gallery and Berggruen Gallery

Taryn Simon at TED

Taryn Simon on FaceBook

Listen to or read the transcript of Simon's April 2016 interview with Charlie Rose.