Taryn Simon

Each work is made up of a number of images that Simon has selected from a given archival category, such as Chiaroscuro, Handshaking, Haircombing, Express Highways, Financial Panics, Israel, and Beards and Mustaches. In artfully overlapped compositions, only slices of the individual images are visible, each fragment intimating its whole. Thus multiple related images are transformed into almost abstract color fields and geometric shapes. The framing and mounting has been specifically designed to make reference to early hanging systems in libraries and museums.

The Picture Collection serves as a tabula rasa where images that are historically inscribed and validated sit beside those that are not. For example, by placing the reproduction of a painting by Kazimir Malevich next to those of unknown artworks hanging in an anonymous hotel room, or a Weegee photograph beside a commissioned advertisement, she puts into question the hierarchies by which visual and cultural materials are categorized. Continually seeking to discover the patterns, codes, and orders within the image overload of contemporary society, Simon questions the very dynamics of contemporary culture as a process of evolution or one doomed to endless repetition.

Taryn Simon was born in New York in 1975. She is a graduate of Brown University and a Guggenheim Fellow. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She was awarded the Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award in 2010. Important exhibitions include “The Innocents,” Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2003, traveled to P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and High Museum of Art, Atlanta through 2006); “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007, traveled to Photographer's Gallery, London, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, and Foam_Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam through 2008); “Photographs and Texts,” Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (2011, traveled to Moscow House of Photography and Helsinki Museum of Art through 2012); and “A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters,” Tate Modern, London (2011, traveled to Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). A major exhibition of Simon's work will open at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing in September 2013.

The Picture Collection was developed alongside the online database Image Atlas, created by Taryn Simon and computer programmer Aaron Swartz. Image Atlas investigates cultural differences and similarities by indexing top image results for given search terms across local search engines throughout the world. The database was featured in the New Museum’s The New Art Online series (2012), and was developed from Rhizome’s signature Seven on Seven conference in April 2012. Aaron Swartz was the founder of Demand Progress—which launched the campaign against Internet censorship bills (SOPA/PIPA)—as well as developer of theinfo.org and a Contributing Editor to The Baffler until his untimely death in January 2013.