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POMERANZ COLLECTION

TARYN SIMON

‘Poolside, Tel Aviv Mini Israel, Latrun, Israel’
2007
Photo laminated on metal
121,92 x 157,48 cm (framed)
Ed 1/7 + 2 AP
Inv. Nr. 181

Born in 1975 in New York City, New York, USA
Lives and works in New York City, New York, USA

Young American photographer, Taryn Simon has developed an ambitious work, which focuses on the nature of cultural and political phenomena. Directing her practice around various themes such as security, religion, politics, science, medicine, and nature, she probes each discipline in an attempt to shatter the illusion of an objective image, of reality captured alive.
Her work is the result of extensive research and investigation, similar in many respects to photojournalism in that the artist places each image in a specific context, using explanatory texts.
The artist has developed a practice, which balances texts and images thus, with her original approach in photographic aesthetics she delivers an ensemble marked by a very singular style.
A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, chapter VI is a set from a series of the same name produced over a period of four years (2008-11), during which the artist travelled around the world researching and delving into the pasts and futures of eighteen bloodlines and their related stories. Her collection is at the same time coherent and arbitrary, mapping between relational accounts by blood but also the components of chance that play part in human destiny. Each of the 18 chapters is organized into three segments: the first one presents a series of portraits of members of the line studied, a second compound of narratives and a third containing elements of "evidence."
The rabbits are one of these, photographed in their Plexiglas homes at a Queensland research facility, as they await lethal injection. The rabbits pictured above are descendants of 24 that travelled from Europe to Australia in 1859. By the turn of the century, an exasperated farming community started already to organised industrial attempts to cull a rampant and destructive leporine population which continues to cost the Australian government hundreds of millions a year. The key to the work is to view it as a reflexion on human life – how blood navigates its way through history, what kinds of things thwart its ebb and flow. In this last respect, it touches on the extent to which our lives are determined by fate or free will.
‘Poolside, Tel Aviv Mini Israel, Latrun, Israel’ is a shot of a miniature which has all of a piece of the real pool in Tel Aviv, but that easily lends itself to confusion except when we look in detail and we understand that s' is a sociological artifact. An element of detail reveals the extent of violence that the image contains when we notice that the dolls was torn off and stolen "The majority of the critical writing on Simon’s work places her art within one or another mode of realism –- the hyperreal or aestheticised realism... The critical response to her work – the story people tell about its aesthetic address and intentionality – is frequently a description of a visual practice committed to the revelation of secret places or the disclosure of unfamiliar things.