Artist Spotlight: Taryn Simon

Exclusively Online | Launching June 23, 2021

There's the impossibility of ever achieving precise truth. The effort is to imagine getting to it, through an assembly of the image, the text, the missing things, the slippages.

—Taryn SimonGagosian's second season of Artist Spotlight—a series that focuses on an individual artist for one week each month—presents new work by #tarynsimon. Conceived in response to the events of the past year, the work will be revealed on June 25 and available to view on gagosian.com for forty-eight hours.On June 23, Gagosian Quarterly will publish a dynamic and wide-ranging conversation between Simon and writer, photographer, and critic Teju Cole, based on a public talk conducted in March 2021 as part of the Lambert Family Lecture Series at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio.

Throughout Artist Spotlight: #tarynsimon, a collection of essays, articles, and videos relating to four of Simon's acclaimed bodies of work—An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007), A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII (2008–11), An Occupation of Loss (2016), and A Cold Hole (2018–19)—will be highlighted across Gagosian's digital channels, offering numerous insights into the artist's expansive range.

A storyteller and researcher driven by the mutability of fact and the documentary potential of fiction, Simon directs our attention to systems of organization, revealing the structures of power and authority hidden within. Working in photography, sculpture, text, sound, performance, and installation, she traces lineages—of objects, families, nations, and histories.For Artist Spotlight, Simon will reveal a large-scale photographic assembly of over two hundred images, collaged in a single piece.

This is the first realized work from a new series for which Simon has spent almost a decade documenting, accumulating, and archiving thousands of photographs. The project confronts the risks and anxieties of motherhood, many of which have crystallized during the pandemic: the primal alertness of the mother's eye, the phantom of morbid uncertainty that continually haunts her mind. Its virtual debut invites audiences to participate in a deliberate act of screen-based looking that betrays the incompatibility between the privacies of the domestic realm and the fundamentally public nature of online existence.

Artist Spotlight: #tarynsimon anticipates Simon's upcoming two-part exhibition The Color of a Flea's Eye: The Picture Collection, to be held at Gagosian, 976 Madison Avenue, New York, starting July 14, 2021, and the New York Public Library, opening this fall.Artist Spotlight is a dynamic platform that enables artists to present their work in the digital realm, sharing their stories with a global audience online.

The series, which launched in April 2020 in response to the pandemic crisis, is now in its second season and is presented once a month as a regular part of Gagosian's programming. Each installment highlights a work by an individual artist, alongside new editorial features and selected archival content.