Taryn Simon

Taryn Simon's exhibition Father Country I Do Love You opens at the Guggenheim Museum in New York this September — I'm looking forward to seeing it. Nearly a decade in the making, the show is Simon's most personal and expansive project to date, with 42 individual artworks spanning photography, text, video, and sculpture, on view during the 250th anniversary of the United States of America.

Research is the backbone of Simon's method. After earning a BA in semiotics from Brown in 1997 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001, she built a practice around exhaustive archival digging paired with formal, controlled image-making. Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015) shows the method at its most exacting: working with a botanist, she identified and recreated the floral centerpieces that sat on tables where 36 international agreements were signed between 1968 and 2014. For this project, she imported over 4,000 flower specimens from the Aalsmeer auction in the Netherlands to rebuild each arrangement from archival photographs.

That same rigor is expected to define Father Country I Do Love You. We’ll soon find out if it carries more emotional weight than the detached systems of her earlier projects.