Amy Simon’s works are evocative meditations on the nature of recollection, identity, and the significance of place.
Encompassing photography, drawing, sculpture, and documentary film, her practice often draws from personal experience. A key example is her extended suite of works titled Io (Italian for "I"), which explores the conventions of portraiture through self-representation, examining emotions, identity, age, and gender.
Simon’s earlier series A different STATE of mind homed in on domestic interiors, capturing separate emotional worlds within each room. The series The way of nature. The way of grace. consisted of surreal photographs and drawings of taxidermized animals in displaced environments, while Everybody Loves Angels focused on the cultural history of angels.
Her 2017 show (almost) Everybody I Say Hello To at Wetterling presented more than 200 portraits of people Simon has met — highlighting the similarities in their features despite differences in gender, age, and ethnicity — a welcome act of connection at a time of global political division.
A conceptual artist working across media and scale, Simon uses images to cull memories and relive experience. Her work invites viewers to explore questions about their own history and to examine themes of memory, belonging, dislocation, and impermanence.