Meticulous staging of the shrill emotions
We know it’s been a while since we published the last In Focus episode… But look, the hiatus had its reasons — well, we had, sinking back into the concerns of the new year. On the plus side, we promise that in 2021 the column will be in some way even more exciting than it used to be last year with some new bright and inimitable talents in the limelight. And the first in line here is a conceptual artist and a photographer, whose works one can hardly pass by indifferently. Meet Sandy Skoglund!
Her tableau photography works are eye-catching and repulsive, if one starts reflecting on what (s)he has just seen… No need for excessive brain work, it’s more about feeling the images with your gizzards, the artist shares. Some may argue they just can’t turn their brains off, watching some OCD-style repetitive elements (hello to Yayoi Kusama) like cheese doodles, slugs, or just a bunch of artificially green cats. But shall it be that by facing our fears directly like if it were just a game, we could shift our viewpoint as well? Eventually, it’s not only humans, you and me, who contemplate this hectic world.
Born in Massachusetts in 1946, Sandy Skoglund spent her childhood traveling around the United States. For some period her family would stop in Anaheim, California, the place where the world’s first Disneyland Park was opened. Such a fortuitous circumstance (every child would say so) influenced the career of the future photographer. A sense of Disney’s glorious cartoon happiness, which one can perfectly buy and sell, has shaped Skoglund’s aesthetics in large part. The artist admits from early on she was attracted by the flickering wrapping of the commercial world, all the more so because it was affordable and applied to everyone.
‘<...> 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’
(Sandy Skoglund, in the interview with Luca Panaro, Betta Frigieri Arte Contemporanea, Modena, Italy. August 2008)
However, Skoglund’s aspiration to become another pop artist would be too straightforward (and simple?) for her. By contrast, she opted for a diverse, continuous education, having begun to study art history and studio art in her native Massachusetts and proceeding with a year stay at the Sorbonne and the École du Louvre in Paris. Despite her postgraduate degree in filmmaking and multimedia art and passion for avant-garde cinema, Sandy Skoglund initially chose an art path, which was considered rather mainstream at the time. She dared to conquer the New York conceptual art scene, moving to the bohemian district of Soho to that end. Well, with a MA of Fine Arts degree under her belt, the artist could experiment as long as she wanted.
‘In art history my favorites were the Italian Mannerists like Bronzino and Pontormo’
(Sandy Skoglund, in the interview with Luca Panaro, Betta Frigieri Arte Contemporanea, Modena, Italy. August 2008)
That’s what she was doing, until the summer of 1977, which came as a watershed moment in her career. While living in a furnished mobile home on a farm in Remsen, Sandy Skoglund passionately captured all around there with a camera, thus, bringing her Reflections Inside A Mobile Home series (1977) to life. By the way, that was hardly a challenge for the artist, while she already had a similar experience. Ever since Skoglund was into conceptual art, she would document her ideas by photographic means and explore all the subtleties and tricks of the field.
‘An artist must always know how to tell the truth about what they see’
(Sandy Skoglund, in the interview with Francesca Esposito, Domus Italy. February 2019)
Hence, since the late 1970s Sandy Skoglund has shifted from painting to photography, and it paid off. Her nose for innovations plus the implementation of her artistic vision in filming have turned into a series of successful photo projects, which made Skoglund’s name resonate. The artist’s first noted series would be the Food Still Lifes (1978), in which she took an ironic stance towards the idealistic consumerist culture of America. The striving after perfection is felt in the matching patterns, which look anything but not a pure coincidence. Then, it’s the excessive vibrancy and the staging character of the images, which makes one feel curious and uncomfortable at once. What is behind the compulsively selected compositions? The fallacy concealed in the Food Still Lifes reminds of the artificial freshness of products on the table as well as at the counter, which the modern world has become obsessed with.
‘After all, everyone eats’
(Sandy Skoglund, original source unknown)
In the 1980s Skoglund diverted her attention from still lifes to genre painting. In her works the artist delves into the utopian human world invaded by the phantasmagoric animals, which are, however, recognizable: cats are undoubtedly cats, while squirrels look like ordinary squirrels with the only distinctive feature, which is color. Radioactive green, ocean blue, seducing violet, strawberry jam red, Skoglund lays as much value on color as she does on composition, trusting her intuition and fantasy. The multiplicity and repetitiveness of the elements in the picture (may I say ‘progression’?) stir a sort of anxiety, which erupts suddenly, out of nowhere like if one saw a scary film. That’s where Sandy Skoglund's inspiration for the series came from. While watching David Lynch and other horror movies, the photographer would keep thinking about the stuff, which though being made by the people, haunt and enslave the latter, and the worst part is, those things multiply, just constantly.
‘Reality is something we believe in, but can never see with the naked eye’
(Sandy Skoglund, in the interview with Blueprint, 2021)
Particularly noteworthy is the technical aspect of Skoglund’s work. Believe it or not, the artist creates her photo settings by hand, sculpting the animal figures from plaster clay or gumming some dummy roses to the floor and the walls of a room. Although Sandy Skoglund has turned pro in making installations, it didn’t use to be like that from the beginning. ‘No one taught me manual work at university. My first attempt to create a dummy fish was humiliating, but each time I would try to make it better — more lively, more sculptural,’ — the photographer shares.
Documentary videos 1992—1998 — Shimmering Madness installation]
Probably the two most recognizable works by Sandy Skoglund are those from the 1980s, Radioactive Cats and Revenge of the Goldfish. The latter title was borrowed by the English rock band Inspiral Carpets, while naming their 1992 album (Skoglund’s photograph graced the album’s cover as well). In more recent works the artist has brought her favorite motifs of obsession and repetition to the climax. However, with all her coherence and commitment to the course chosen, Sandy Skoglund doesn’t fear to drift from it and try new things. This was the case with her True Fiction (Two) series issued in 1986 and 2004 respectively.
‘The primary issue for me as an artist is how to reconcile the irrational and the rational and how to include insanity in the context of sanity’
(Sandy Skoglund, in the interview with Douglas Dreishpoon, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 2001)
Initiating True Fiction in the far 1986, the artist intended to show the ambiguity of the American day-to-day life, where the violence of car accidents coexisted with fashion for urban renewal. The photographs depict some genre scenes with people’s faces in focus and the perspective shifted, reminding a hand-painted papier collé. Back then Skoglund was about to create 25 editions of images using the dye transfer materials, when she suddenly learnt that Kodak had cancelled their production. Logically, the series was discontinued, while its revival fell on the early aughts. In 2004 Sandy Skoglund announced the launch of the True Fiction Two series of twenty different images. In order to imitate the original method of printing, the photographer used archival pigmented inkjet technology, which enabled her to refine the colors and alter the contrast compared to the original issue. True Fiction Two series was completed in 2008.
‘What is the meaning of my work? For me, it's really in doing it’
(from Sandy Skoglund: Galerie Guy Bärtschi by Richard Leydier, Art-Press, 2005)
Along with doing art, Skoglund is also devoted to sharing knowledge with younger colleagues. She started her teaching career as an art professor at the University of Hartford in 1973—1976. Today she is teaching photography and multimedia at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Numerous US museum collections such as those of the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Montclair Art Museum, and Dayton Art Institute, include Sandy Skoglund’s works. The artist’s solo exhibitions regularly take place in the cultural space of Europe and America.
Text: Julia Kryshevich @juliatecho