JTF (just the facts): A total of 6 color photographs (on view in a single white-walled gallery space) and 1 participatory sculpture (on view in the front room surrounded by red drapery). (Installation shots below.)

The following works are included in the show:

• 6 archival inkjet prints, in artist’s frames, 2024, sized roughly 28x33x2 inches, in editions of 4+2AP
• 1 cast resin and metal sculpture, 2024, 67x18x16 inches, in an edition of 3+2AP

Comments/Context: In the past two decades, intensive background research, rich conceptual deconstruction, and precise taxonomic ordering have been the hallmarks of Taryn Simon’s photographic projects. In the course of her investigations into a particular subject, visual evidence and artifacts have been carefully considered, sorted, organized, and re-presented, often revealing connections and meanings that had previously been hidden. Her work is rooted in a deliberate and meticulous artistic thinking process, the application of which leads to the unexpected insights that give her work its durable punch. In many ways, her art has never been about the photographs themselves (many of which have been straightforward still lifes and portraits), so much as the implications of the surrounding structures that have given them context and meaning.

Along the way, Simon has burrowed into a range of esoteric topics. She crafted taxonomies of contraband and counterfeit goods confiscated by authorities at JFK airport. She traced the bloodlines and genealogies of groups of survivors, settlers, and orphans, following consequences and narratives down through the generations (as seen in a 2012 MoMA show, reviewed here). She presented the floral bouquets found on the conference tables at economic and political negotiations (as seen in a 2016 gallery show, reviewed here). And more recently, she dove into the extensive Picture Collection of the New York Public Library, fashioning layered collages from the archival images. In each case, the individual pictures led to deeper dialogues with the systems and hierarchies that were used to organize them.

And while politics can be said to have been simmering around in many of Simon’s projects over the years, her new photographs wade into the recent American political scene more explicitly than ever before. Using the 2024 presidential campaign as her source material, she has extracted a selection of visual fragments that reflect some of the distractions, resonant symbols, and fleeting stories that flashed into the collective American consciousness at that time, if only for a brief moment. Her resulting images feel like touchstones of a specific time and place in American history, isolated in ways that magnify their strangeness and absurdity.

None of Simon’s photographs include images of the candidates, voters, or any other people involved in the election. Instead, they largely center in on the theatrics of the political back-and-forth, as seen in still life objects. The now-infamous pet Miss Sassy sits on a stacked pile of towels in one image; her claim to fame is being one of the cats from Springfield, Ohio, that candidate Donald Trump claimed (during a presidential debate) had been eaten by Haitian immigrants. The photograph itself provides a direct repudiation of that assertion, making her a tangible symbol of the cycles of conspiracies and fake news that have overwhelmed the daily media.

Trump’s performative turn as a McDonald’s fry cook is captured in a recreation of the racks of fries that were visible behind him during his made-to-be-televised moment in an apron. Simon has turned them into a neatly ordered array, set against a deep red backdrop, like the pattern of a fabric or spectators seated in an amphitheater. A second red image features stacks of red voting bins and numbered plastic security ties found in an election warehouse in Philadelphia; these would likely have been used to process mail-in-ballots, the setup alluding to the many questions surrounding election security and voter fraud that percolated through the campaign.

Simon’s color palette shifts to blue in her still life of Representative Jasmine Crockett’s eyelashes. The pair of fake eyelashes became news when Crockett was called out for wearing them during a hearing by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, leading to a meme-worthy back-and-forth that had undercurrents of race, class, and female beauty standards all wrapped up in the insult-driven altercation. Simon’s image turns the eyelashes into a kind of revealed treasure, with the placement of the lashes against the white cushion making them looked like eyes turned demurely downward, which was far from the mood of the interchange.

The other two images on view have a bit more literal darkness in them. One documents the fiery launch of a SpaceX Dragon rocket in the night (or early morning), with a human crew aboard headed for the International Space Station; at the time, Elon Musk’s relationship to Donald Trump was still in formation, with Musk’s more full support of the administration (both politically and economically) coming later. The other captures the dark center of clustered red, white, and blue balloons at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. While Simon doesn’t make her own politics particularly visible in these images, the dark shadowy void in the middle of this photograph feels like a visual allusion to either an emptiness in the process or an ominous sense of foreboding.

Beyond the election photographs, the show also includes a sculptural object Simon made in 2024 as a commission for the Storm King Art Center. It’s a re-creation of an ancient Athenian governance device (a kleroterion), which was used to randomly select male citizens for political duties, as elections were thought to be too corruptible. Five colored chips are inserted into slots, and after turning a hand crank, balls apparently travel through the machine and knock out all but one chip, thereby making a selection. The device is entirely functional and gallery visitors are encouraged to give it a try. Conceptually, this sealed chance-driven machine seems altogether fairer than some of the political theatrics and shenanigans found in Simon’s nearby photographs, seemingly offering us a step back into a simpler and purer time in the long history of democracy.

It seems like a marked change in direction for Simon to move away from the research-driven intellectualism of her earlier work and to embrace the spirit of the political moment as her subject matter. If only because we have come to expect such depth and rigor from Simon, these new works feel a bit slight, like one offs that are certainly well-crafted but lacking in the richness of thinking her work has typically offered (and required). The press release for the show calls the new photographs “a developing body of work”, so perhaps we are at the beginning of something more complex and substantial than it appears on first glance. Politics will always be fodder for photographic interpretation; the question is more whether an intellectual artist like Simon can find much underneath its surfaces worth excavating.

Collector’s POV: The photographs in this show are priced at $30000 each. Simon’s work has been intermittently available in the secondary markets in the past decade, with prices ranging from roughly $4000 to $23000.