Taryn Simon
18 Jan - 06 Apr 2008
TARYN SIMON
"An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar"
18 January – 6 April 2008
In March 2007 an international jury named Taryn Simon as one of two winners of the annual KLM Paul Huf Award. Part of this prize for young international photographers is an exhibition at Foam. An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar is the second of these two shows.
For An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, artist Taryn Simon assumes the dual role of shrewd informant and collector of curiosities, compiling an inventory of what lies hidden and out-of-view within the borders of the United States. She examines a culture through careful documentation of diverse subjects from the realms of science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature, security and religion. Transforming the unknown into a seductive and intelligible form, Simon confronts the divide between those with and without the privilege of access. Her sometimes ethereal, sometimes foreboding compositions, shot with a large-format view camera whenever conditions allowed, vary as much as her subject matter, which ranges from radioactive capsules at a nuclear waste storage facility to a black bear in hibernation. Offering visions of the unseen, the photographs of An American Index capture the strange magic at the foundation of a national identity.
Taryn Simon was born in New York in 1975. She is a graduate of Brown University and a Guggenheim Fellow. Her influential project, The Innocents, documents cases of wrongful conviction in the United States and investigates photography's role in that process. Simon's photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta and the Museum fur Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt/Main. Her photography and writing have been featured in numerous publications and broadcasts including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, CNN, BBC, Frontline, and NPR.
An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, is published by Steidl and includes a foreword by Salman Rushdie, introduction by Elizabeth Sussman and Tina Kukielski and commentary by Ronald Dworkin.
"An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar"
18 January – 6 April 2008
In March 2007 an international jury named Taryn Simon as one of two winners of the annual KLM Paul Huf Award. Part of this prize for young international photographers is an exhibition at Foam. An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar is the second of these two shows.
For An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, artist Taryn Simon assumes the dual role of shrewd informant and collector of curiosities, compiling an inventory of what lies hidden and out-of-view within the borders of the United States. She examines a culture through careful documentation of diverse subjects from the realms of science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature, security and religion. Transforming the unknown into a seductive and intelligible form, Simon confronts the divide between those with and without the privilege of access. Her sometimes ethereal, sometimes foreboding compositions, shot with a large-format view camera whenever conditions allowed, vary as much as her subject matter, which ranges from radioactive capsules at a nuclear waste storage facility to a black bear in hibernation. Offering visions of the unseen, the photographs of An American Index capture the strange magic at the foundation of a national identity.
Taryn Simon was born in New York in 1975. She is a graduate of Brown University and a Guggenheim Fellow. Her influential project, The Innocents, documents cases of wrongful conviction in the United States and investigates photography's role in that process. Simon's photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta and the Museum fur Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt/Main. Her photography and writing have been featured in numerous publications and broadcasts including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, CNN, BBC, Frontline, and NPR.
An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, is published by Steidl and includes a foreword by Salman Rushdie, introduction by Elizabeth Sussman and Tina Kukielski and commentary by Ronald Dworkin.