“Taryn Simon: Photographs and Texts”
Helsinki City Art Museum
Kluuvi Gallery
Unioninkatu 28 B
April 9–May 6, 2012
Milwaukee Art Museum
700 N. Art Museum Drive
September 22, 2011–January 1, 2012
Moscow House of Photography / Multimedia Art Museum
Ostozhenka 16
January 20–February 19, 2012
Curated by Lisa Hostetler
With the tenacious sleuthing sensibility of an investigative reporter and a keen eye for the resonantly offbeat, Taryn Simon has spent the past decade turning her lens toward the forbidden and the forgotten, producing documentary photographs paired with concise factual texts. This midcareer survey will focus on four of the artist’s most ambitious projects, including her 2007 series “An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar,” which led viewers behind the scenes at normally inaccessible sites—nuclear-waste-storage facilities, cryonic units, CIA headquarters—and “Contraband,” 2010, for which she spent five days shooting items confiscated or detained at New York’s JFK International Airport. With its aggregation of the exotic (dried deer penis) and the mundane (a plastic pitcher jammed full of salami), the latter series encapsulates Simon’s operative fascination: the curious stories that reside in the material facts of things.