Taryn Simon: Father Country I Do Love You

He acted as a middleman, witnessing events great and small, collecting evidence for someone else to slot into the bigger picture. Everything he touched ricocheted to the outer boundaries of nations and lives he’d never know. Father Country I Do Love You traces the life of an unnamed federal agent through 42 chapters, bringing together hundreds of photographs, text, video, and sculpture. In this labyrinth of stories, Taryn Simon uncovers the ripple effects of her protagonist’s actions and inactions, intertwining accounts of victims, predators, survivors, and the mechanics of justice. This narrative is shadowed by the life of Simon’s father, who lived in Thailand and traveled to Russia, Iran, Israel, China, Afghanistan, Korea, and elsewhere while working for the U.S. government, before ending his career manufacturing and selling arcade games. Simon never got his full story, but America, he always said, was the best story on earth, if you could find someone to tell it. Taryn Simon (b. 1975, New York) is widely recognized as one of the most significant conceptual artists working with photography today. Her projects using photography, text, video, sculpture, and performance, center on storytelling, redirecting our attention to the unseen. Simon’s exhibitions and artist books include The Innocents (2000–2003), which traces the stories of individuals imprisoned for crimes they did not commit, questioning photography’s function as a credible eyewitness; An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007), which examines the divide between public and expert access through hidden and unknown objects and sites in the U.S.; A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters (2008–2011), for which Simon traveled the world tracing bloodlines and their related stories; Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015), which recreates flower arrangements that stood between men signing international treaties; and An Occupation of Loss (2016), in which professional mourners enact rituals of grief, simultaneously broadcasting their lamentations from within a sculptural installation.