Sandy Skoglund

Sandy Skoglund (born September 11, 1946) is an American photographer and installation artist. Her contributions to photography have advanced the medium as a form of conceptual art. She is well known for her intricately designed environments, which utilize painterly and sculptural techniques within staged and performative scenes. Photography critic Andy Grundberg notes that Skoglund’s work contains “all the hallmarks of the new attitude toward photographs: they embrace blatant artificiality; they allude to and draw from an ‘image world’ of endless pre-existing photographs, and they reduce the world to the status of a film set.”

Sandy Skoglund
Skoglund in 2013
Born	(1946-09-11) September 11, 1946 Weymouth, Massachusetts, U.S.
Education	Smith College University of Iowa
Known for	Photography, Sculpture, Installation
Notable work	Radioactive Cats (1980) Sock Situation (1986) The Cocktail Party (1992) Shimmering Madness (1998) Raining Pop Corn (2001)
Movement	Conceptual art
Website	http://www.sandyskoglund.com/

The impact of Skoglund’s juxtaposition of commercial aspects, dramatization, and conceptual art elements, is described by curator Marvin Heiferman, who explains that “The work simmers down and reminds viewers of their smallness in a big, overdetermined world where consumer culture, nature, science, and their interior gyroscopes regularly spin out of control.”

Biography

Skoglund was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts on September 11, 1946. She spent her childhood all over the country including the states Maine, Connecticut, and California. She studied both art history and studio art at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, graduating in 1968. In 1967, she studied art history through her college's study abroad program at the Sorbonne and École du Louvre in Paris, France. After graduating from Smith, Skoglund taught middle-school art in Batavia, Illinois for a year before attending graduate school at the University of Iowa, where she studied filmmaking, multimedia art, and printmaking. In 1971, she earned her Master of Arts and in 1972 a Master of Fine Arts in painting from Iowa. Skoglund was an art professor at the University of Hartford between 1973 and 1976.

Skoglund holds a faculty position at the Department of Arts, Culture and Media of Rutgers University–Newark in Newark, New Jersey.

In 1972, Skoglund began working as a conceptual artist in New York City. She taught herself photography to document her artistic endeavors, and experiment with the theme of repetition. She also become interested in advertising and high technology—trying to re-frame mass media aesthetics for a noncommercial purpose via combining the technical focus found in the commercial world and bringing that into the fine art studio. In an interview with curator Luca Panaro, she imparts that, “Mixing of the natural and the artificial is what I do everyday of my life, and I hope that I am not alone in this process.”  

Artworks, style, and themes

Skoglund often creates compositions by building elaborate sets or tableaux, and embellishing them with carefully selected colored furniture and other objects, as well as live models. She then photographs the set. The works are characterized by a formidable amount of one particular object, painterly mark-making, and either bright contrasting colors or a monochromatic color scheme. Skoglund's works are quirky and idiosyncratic, and as former photography critic for The New York Times Andy Grundberg describes, they "evoke adult fears in a playful, childlike context".

Food and animals are common elements in Skoglund’s work. She explains the significance and allure to both food and animal imagery, stating that: “I think of Food as a universal language. Everyone eats. For the camera, food has colors and textures that can be manipulated to fabulous effect. I love the childish behavior of sculpting and painting with food. Food as a material allows me to explore the boundaries between nature and artifice…In my works with animals, I like to ask: who is looking at whom? I am especially interested in exploring consciousness as seen from a non-human perspective. Animal life presents people with a relief from themselves.”

Skoglund’s 1992 installation, The Cocktail Party and Raining Popcorn (2001) are indicative of her sentiments about using food as raw artistic material. Each playfully employs an extensive amount of popular snack foods in order to create fantastical scenes that also address popular culture and history. In The Cocktail Party, Cheez Doodles preserved in Epoxy resin are affixed to human models and inanimate living room objects to create rich textural surfaces and a palette of mostly orange, but with slivers of purple to create a complimentary color relationship. The piece is a witty commentary on the artificial nature of certain social gatherings.

Raining Popcorn (2001), draws on Skoglund’s experience living in Iowa, as a student at the University of Iowa, where she witnessed seemingly endless fields of corn. The work was commissioned by Grinnell College of Art in 2001, and was on view at the school’s art museum from June 1 through September 16, 2001. It depicts a woodland composition where live models and the surrounding environment are enveloped in starch white popcorn. Skoglund researched the history of popcorn in the Americas from its Indigenous and colonial use in celebrations and rituals, to its more recent association as a snack of leisure and entertainment. The resulting composition is indicative of corn’s complicated relationship to the history and progression of American culture.

The utilization of repetitive, process-oriented techniques began early on in Skoglund’s career. Her 1973 composition Crumpled and Copied was manifested by repeatedly crumpling and photocopying a piece of paper. The Holes in a Saltine Cracker (1974) portrays how self-regulating repetition influences an object’s aesthetic value. Photographing a single saltine cracker and then reproducing that image 77 times, resulted in a composition that became abstracted and obscured in accordance with the subtle mechanical shifts derived from the Xeroxing process.

In 1978, Skoglund expanded on this theme by producing a series of repetitive food item still life images. These photographs of food were presented in geometric and brightly colored environments so that the food becomes an integral part to the overall patterning, as in Cubed Carrots and Kernels of Corn (1978), with its checkerboard of carrots on a white-spotted red plate placed on a cloth in the same pattern.

One of Skoglund's best known works, titled Radioactive Cats (1980), features life-size, bright green-painted clay cats running amok in a gray kitchen. An older man sits in a chair with his back facing the camera while his elderly wife looks into a refrigerator that is the same color as the walls. The cats were sculpted using chicken wire and plaster. The kitchen is furnished with used furniture Skoglund acquired, and the man and woman that Skoglund used as models were her neighbors at the time. The end product is a very evocative photograph. In a 2013 online forum by the Getty Center for Education in the Arts, Terry Barrett and Sydney Walker identified two viable interpretations of Radioactive Cats. The first is about social indifference to the elderly and the second is nuclear war and its aftermath, suggested by the artist’s title.

Her 1989 artwork, Fox Games, has a similar imaginative feel to Radioactive Cats. The composition envisions a restaurant scene where the tables, chairs, windows, chandelier, and food items are painted in grayscale. In the back corner of the dining room, two individuals are served by a waiter, while bright red foxes are depicted as being playfully in motion around the room.

Another well recognized composition of Skoglund's, is a fantastical arrangement featuring numerous goldfish hovering above two people in bed late at night, called Revenge of the Goldfish (1981). The artwork was used as cover art for the Inspiral Carpets 1992 album, also titled Revenge of the Goldfish. Revenge of the Goldfish utilizes a variety of elements of art and design, including the juxtaposition of complimentary colors, scale, and balance. All of these aspects contribute to the artworks’ dramatic effect. The background consists of a monochromatic deep blue, which is reminiscent of both nighttime and the ocean. This blue is contrasted by bright orange goldfish floating through the room. Skoglund arranged the human models from a vantage point that makes their identities ambiguous to the viewer.

In 1985, Skoglund completed a series titled "True Fiction One". The process of creating the series incorporated the photomontage technique. Skoglund began by taking photographs of candid street and domestic scenes in black and white, later adding color to them in the darkroom. Then she cut and pasted pieces of the photographs into collaged compositions and rephotographed them using an 8 by 10 large format camera. In 2005, she revisited the series, this time utilizing digital tools like Photoshop to alter the images. The revamped series of compositions is called “True Fiction Two.”

In 2002, Skoglund designed the men's bathroom for the Smith College Museum of Art, as an installation called Liquid Origins, Fluid Dreams. For this unique setting, she created and arranged symbolic motifs on ceramic tile based on mythology and folklore.

In 2008, Skoglund began a series of nature themed artworks, titled “The Project of the Four Seasons.” The series includes Fresh Hybrid and Winter. Fresh Hybrid (2008) is an artificial landscape, where organic materials like blades of grass and bark are replaced by pipe cleaners and wool fibers. The making of Winter began through the familiar process of installation and photography, but Skoglund eventually decided to create a work that was fully rendered digitally. She notes that: “With the theme of winter, I imagined snowflakes. Initially, I made them from clay, because I have experience with ceramics, and I liked the idea of fragility. I worked for two years on these, and then hated them. I experimented with materials. In the end I cut them digitally. In a certain sense, Winter is a completely digital work, but at the same time it exists physically.”

In 2015, the Ryan Lee Gallery in New York City, presented a window installation of Skoglund’s 1979 work Hangers. The work was initially displayed at the Castelli Gallery. The composition of a man in yellow pajamas entering a dreamlike setting of rubber duckies, plastic chairs and blue plastic hangers arranged on a yellow wall, was created inside her former tenement studio on Elizabeth Street in lower Manhattan. Skoglund recreated the work as a site-specific installation that was prominently on view for anyone walking along the High Line, which is adjacent to Ryan Lee Gallery’s window display. Every Saturday during the installation’s run, a performer meandered around the space.

Collections and exhibitions

Revenge of the Goldfish was featured in the 1981 Whitney Biennial, as well being exhibited Saint Louis Art Museum in 1981. Photographs of the artwork have been on view and collected by several institutions including, Smith College Museum of Art, which also owns the original installation.

In 2000, the Galerie Guy Bärtschi in Geneva, Switzerland held an exhibition of 30 works by Skoglund. The photographs ranged her late 1970s series of plates on tablecloths to works from the 1980s and 1990s. A critic who reviewed the exhibition, Richard Leydier, commented that Skoglund criticism is littered with interpretations of all kinds, whether feminist, sociological, psychoanalytical or whatever. Skoglund has been nonchalant about how her work is read, while being forthcoming about the intent behind her work, saying, "What is the meaning of my work? For me, it's really in doing it."

Another career retrospective of Skoglund’s work was on view in 2019 at the Centro Italiano per la Fotografia in Turin, Italy. The title of the exhibition was Sandy Skoglund: Visioni Ibride, which translates to Hybrid Visions, a symbolic reference to her fusion of diverse media and imagery. The exhibition was curated by Germano Celant, who also published a comprehensive monograph on Skoglund’s work from the 1970s to the present (2019).

Skoglund’s works are held in numerous museum collections including the The Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Denver Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Montclair Art Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, McNay Art Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, the High Museum of Art, the Getty Museum, Colleges and Historic Deerfield Museum Consortium, Smith College, Grinnell College Museum of Art, and the Dayton Art Institute.

External links

• Sandy Skoglund's official website

Further reading

• Celant, Germano (2019). Sandy Skoglund. Milan: Silvana Editoriale. 978-8836642670.
• Faulconer Gallery, Daniel Strong, Milton Severe, Marvin Heiferman, and Douglas Dreishpoon. Raining Popcorn: Sandy Skoglund. Grinnell, Iowa: Grinnell College, Faulconer Gallery, 2001.
• Grundberg, Andy (2024). How Photography Became Contemporary Art. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Rosenblum, Naomi (2014). A history of women photographers. New York: Abbeville. OCLC 946544670.
• Rosenblum, Robert, Linda Muehlig, Ann H. Sievers, Carol Squiers, and Sandy Skoglund. Sandy Skoglund: Reality Under Siege : a Retrospective. London: Harry N. Abrams, 1998.
• Skoglund, Sandy (1992). Sandy Skoglund : 28 d'abril al 31 de maig 1992. Barcelona: Sala Catalunya de la Fundació "La Caixa". OCLC 27437229.
• Skoglund, Sandy (2009). The artificial mirror. Roma: Contrasto due srl. OCLC 693751458.