Taryn Simon is seated in a conference room at the Guggenheim, looking dazed. Her new show, Father Country I Do Love You, opens in under three weeks. It’s a big deal, the first monographic exhibition by a photography-based artist in the iconic spiral rotunda, and the largest debut of new work ever staged at the museum. There’s still a lot of work to be done.
Downstairs, the lobby is being transformed into the Bangkok living room of Jim Thompson, a silk businessman-slash-spy who disappeared in 1967. Simon’s father, a US government worker, was living in Thailand at the time and figured that the Chinese got him, if not a tiger. When Simon was nine, the father and daughter recreated Thompson’s famous wood-panelled den back in Long Island. “And then I built it here with fake teak,” she says, voice wilting. “It’s driving me nuts. I’ve spent so much time trying to make non-teak look like teak.”
