Meet Miss Sassy, the cat who sparked Trump’s pet-eating ravings: Taryn Simon’s thrilling election photographs
From the Ohio pussy who triggered a wild conspiracy theory to the Brexit ‘Leave’ votes piling up, the great American photographer has turned her lens on election excesses. But what are those fake eyelashes doing in there?
In 2016, almost by accident, the US artist Taryn Simon ended up making a video work about the most important moment in recent British political history. While scouting for a location for another work, she visited Alexandra Palace in London just as a rehearsal for the Brexit ballot-counting was taking place. “I immediately asked if I could come back and film the actual count,” says Simon, whose request was approved, making her the only person in the world permitted to record a Brexit count.
She’s speaking with me from Paris, where the video has just gone on show. Presented on two screens, it is at first unremarkable: one view shows a wide frame of the historic Great Hall of the palace, with count staff seated at tables covered with black tablecloths and scattered with paper. A second screen offers a closeup view of two count staff in their official burgundy T-shirts, sorting papers into “Leave” and “Remain”. The tension mounts as each stack grows, but no climax is reached.
“It’s a basic picture of the act,” says Simon, who was up until 4am filming the vote count. “I was thinking about the things that trigger these decisions: how the process of counting up desires – and the fervour for change – happens literally in our sleep, deep in the night.”
The undramatic and sober view of this monumental event becomes increasingly chilling with the endless, repetitive sound of paper-sorting, leading towards the outcome we all now know. “Ultimately, it’s just paper,” says Simon, “but it has such a heavy outcome for so many people.” Simon sees the papers as “surrogates” for citizens, the near weightlessness of the material at odds with the gravity of the decision. “I remember sitting there in extreme shock as they were calling out the results and being amazed how something could turn so quickly. It felt unreal.”
Simon, 50, is best known for her minimalist, index-like photographs, densely researched still lifes and portraits of things that are hidden – or so familiar they usually pass you by. Working with a large-format camera, she has often gone to extremes, to the edges of society. She has photographed Saddam Hussein’s son Uday’s body double, a nuclear waste storage facility in Washington State, a cryopreservation unit where bodies are frozen just after death, and the Church of Scientology.
The Brexit video is part of The Game, a new exhibition of Simon’s work at the Almine Rech gallery in Paris. The Game deals with the everyday objects and events that influence electoral outcomes, right down to a cat from Ohio called Miss Sassy. Alongside the Brexit video, Simon has installed artefact-like photographs, printed and framed in bright colours, chosen to catch your attention as if they’re playful “distractions”. However, as she points out, “They are actually directions we’re following – whether by force, ignorance, or both.”
Each image is related to the 2024 presidential election in the US, where Simon lives. She travelled the country photographing things such as a Fox News microphone, Capitol police riot gear, McDonald’s fries, and balloons on standby at a Republican National Convention. She also photographed Miss Sassy, the cat who was at the centre of a media maelstrom last year after her owner accused her Haitian immigrant neighbours in Springfield, Ohio, of abducting her. By the time Donald Trump got hold of the story, Haitians were accused of eating her.
“It’s just a cat,” says Simon. “She had no idea what narrative she was part of, nor did she have any active participation. But she became this emblem of paranoia and conspiracy theory that consumed a town and created incredible discord. The cat was later found alive in her owner’s basement – but the outcome doesn’t matter. The story kept going. You can hang your hat on the lie and that’s quite scary.”
Simon turns Miss Sassy back into a straightforward image of a cat, but one that is now also a symbol of the disease and the proliferation of misinformation. It recalls one of her early, groundbreaking projects in the early 00s, The Innocents, in which the artist documented people who had been wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for violent crimes. She photographed many of them at the crime scenes after they’d been released – places they had no association with or had never been to. “The fiction takes over, the story consumes, even when there’s so much evidence of the opposite.”
Another photograph is of false eyelashes worn by the Democratic politician Jasmine Crockett. Enshrined in their white and pink case, they are eerie and unseeing. “I could have gone to CVS to buy a pair,” Simon says, “but that’s the horror of my work – I never fake it.” She photographed them after a fiery showdown – that later went viral – during a US House Committee meeting in 2024, triggered by Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene telling Crockett: “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.” She hit back with comments about Greene’s bleached blonde hair. Crockett’s office were somewhat taken aback by Simon’s request to photograph her eyelashes, but agreed. “Sometimes, these quieter things that stand outside and fly by are actually the crux of the story.”
The Game sees Simon – who had a solo exhibition at London’s Tate Modern in 2011, aged 36 – returning to the kind of photographic work she made her name with, after years focusing on performance and installation work. “Obviously, the photographic document can generate or reinscribe certainties that are wrong, but it’s also an important tool for pushing against error. It can be that mushy. I don’t think photography has to be clear. I think of photographs as their own creatures who help us see things we can’t or don’t see. They stop time and let you look, make you pause. That’s incredibly valuable, even if I can’t get them to answer.”
The show also pays homage to Simon’s father, an inventor of arcade and video games. “He made pinball machines, air hockey tables, skeeball. I spent my whole childhood in arcades. I always wanted to make a game but I never found the thing that aligned with what I do.” But now she has – and it takes the form of her reimagining the kleroterion – an ancient Athenian device for randomly selecting male citizens for public roles.
“Only fragments of it exist,” she says animatedly, “and no one really knows how it worked. It had hundreds of slots and any male citizen could insert a chip and have a chance at being chosen for public office or jury duty.”
The kleroterion highlights an important and under-appreciated element of Simon’s often hard-hitting work: humour. In the gallery in Paris, she has installed a red and blue Vegas-esque carpet. “A weird collision,” she jokes, “between the UN and a cruise ship.” Her work revels in life’s more laughable absurdities – even if, in the past, it has been hard to see because of the gravity of her themes. For now, at least, she is happy to sit back and enjoy it. “It’s fun to watch people enter a serious gallery space and have to play a game.”
Simon’s kleroterion is an interactive sculpture that looks like a tall cabinet, with five slots for tokens arranged vertically, and another five horizontally – intended to reflect average family sizes, globally. It encourages us to think about how decision-making happens at a domestic and national level. It took a few years for Simon to figure out the engineering. “The only way to really get a random result is by error,” she says, “which was an interesting thought.”
Simon’s father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s soon after she decided to make the work. “That’s the sadness of it. He’s been part of literally every single thing I’ve done, and now he’s not totally present. But he loves it in his own way.” The work isn’t just a tribute to her father – it could herald another career shift. “I wouldn’t mind quitting,” she says, “and going into arcading.”
• Taryn Simon: The Game is at Almine Rech, Paris, until 26 July.