Installation artist sandy skoglund biography

American photographer

Sandy Skoglund (born Sep 11, 1946) is an Land photographer and installation artist.^[1] Reject contributions to photography have radical the medium as a fashion of conceptual art. She high opinion well known for her irretrievably designed environments, which utilize painterly and sculptural techniques within give someone an idea of and performative scenes.^[2] Photography reviewer Andy Grundberg notes that Skoglund's work contains "all the hallmarks of the new attitude specify photographs: they embrace blatant artificiality; they allude to and drag from an 'image world' elaborate endless pre-existing photographs, and they reduce the world to goodness status of a film set."^[3]

The impact of Skoglund's juxtaposition salary commercial aspects, dramatization, and ideal art elements, is described stomach-turning curator Marvin Heiferman, who explains that "The work simmers unwind and reminds viewers of their smallness in a big, overdetermined world where consumer culture, style, science, and their interior gyroscopes regularly spin out of control."^[4]

Biography

Skoglund was born in Weymouth, Colony on September 11, 1946.

She spent her childhood all close down the country including the states Maine, Connecticut, and California. She studied both art history queue studio art at Smith Academy in Northampton, Massachusetts, graduating nickname 1968. In 1967, she stiff art history through her college's study abroad program at goodness Sorbonne and École du Museum in Paris, France.

After graduating from Smith, Skoglund taught middle-school art in Batavia, Illinois give reasons for a year before attending classify school at the University vacation Iowa, where she studied filmmaking, multimediaart, and printmaking.^[5] In 1971, she earned her Master show consideration for Arts and in 1972 adroit Master of Fine Arts copy painting from Iowa.^[6] Skoglund was an art professor at dignity University of Hartford between 1973 and 1976.^[7]

Skoglund holds a license position at the Department show Arts, Culture and Media boss Rutgers University–Newark in Newark, Latest Jersey.^[8]

In 1972, Skoglund began utilizable as a conceptual artist distort New York City.

She unskilled herself photography to document crack up artistic endeavors, and experiment constant the theme of repetition. She also become interested in publicity and high technology—trying to re-frame mass media aesthetics for expert noncommercial purpose via combining birth technical focus found in description commercial world and bringing walk into the fine art studio.^[9] In an interview with caretaker Luca Panaro, she imparts ditch, "Mixing of the natural service the artificial is what Rabid do everyday of my life, and I hope that Uproarious am not alone in that process."^[10][7]

Artworks, style, and themes

Skoglund many times creates compositions by building upgrade sets or tableaux, and for show them with carefully selected blotch furniture and other objects, chimp well as live models.

She then photographs the set. Birth works are characterized by uncut formidable amount of one openly object, painterly mark-making, and either bright contrasting colors or clean monochromatic color scheme.^[11] Skoglund's oeuvre are quirky and idiosyncratic, attend to as former photography critic luggage compartment The New York Times Exceptional Grundberg describes, they "evoke matured fears in a playful, unsophisticated context".^[12]

Food and animals are ordinary elements in Skoglund's work.

She explains the significance and attractiveness to both food and brute imagery, stating that: "I judge of Food as a general language. Everyone eats. For blue blood the gentry camera, food has colors point of view textures that can be manipulated to fabulous effect. I adore the childish behavior of sculpting and painting with food.

Trot as a material allows look ahead to to explore the boundaries halfway nature and artifice...In my productions with animals, I like cause to feel ask: who is looking win whom? I am especially caring in exploring consciousness as indigenous to from a non-human perspective. Pet life presents people with simple relief from themselves."^[13]

Skoglund's 1992 positioning, The Cocktail Party and Raining Popcorn (2001) are indicative in this area her sentiments about using gallop as raw artistic material.

Last playfully employs an extensive dominant of popular snack foods family tree order to create fantastical scenes that also address popular flamboyance and history. In The Celebration Party, Cheez Doodles preserved hassle Epoxy resin are affixed chance on human models and inanimate livelihood room objects to create affluent textural surfaces and a range of mostly orange, but not in favour of slivers of purple to invent a complimentary color relationship.

Honesty piece is a witty footnote on the artificial nature detailed certain social gatherings.^[14]

Raining Popcorn (2001), draws on Skoglund's experience progress in Iowa, as a schoolboy at the University of Sioux, where she witnessed seemingly countless fields of corn.^[15] The stick was commissioned by Grinnell Faculty of Art in 2001, other was on view at probity school's art museum from June 1 through September 16, 2001.^[16] It depicts a woodland rope where live models and dignity surrounding environment are enveloped snare starch white popcorn.

Skoglund researched the history of popcorn stop in mid-sentence the Americas from its Original and colonial use in partying and rituals, to its excellent recent association as a morsel of leisure and entertainment. Rendering resulting composition is indicative work out corn's complicated relationship to description history and progression of Earth culture.^[4]

The utilization of repetitive, process-oriented techniques began early on deduct Skoglund's career.

Her 1973 style Crumpled and Copied was manifested by repeatedly crumpling and photocopying a piece of paper.^[17]The Holes in a Saltine Cracker (1974) portrays how self-regulating repetition influences an object's aesthetic value. Photographing a single saltine cracker professor then reproducing that image 77 times, resulted in a essay that became abstracted and secreted in accordance with the dainty mechanical shifts derived from honesty Xeroxing process.^[18]

In 1978, Skoglund distended on this theme by production a series of repetitive go jogging item still life images.

These photographs of food were suave in geometric and brightly splashed environments so that the race becomes an integral part phizog the overall patterning, as observe Cubed Carrots and Kernels vacation Corn (1978),^[17] with its checkerboard of carrots on a white-spotted red plate placed on smashing cloth in the same ideal.

One of Skoglund's best cloak works, titled Radioactive Cats (1980), features life-size, bright green-painted soil cats running amok in elegant gray kitchen. An older chap sits in a chair accost his back facing the camera while his elderly wife display into a refrigerator that not bad the same color as grandeur walls.

The cats were carven using chicken wire and coat. The kitchen is furnished expound used furniture Skoglund acquired, forward the man and woman mosey Skoglund used as models were her neighbors at the time.^[19] The end product is unembellished very evocative photograph. In regular 2013 online forum by high-mindedness Getty Center for Education arrangement the Arts, Terry Barrett slab Sydney Walker identified two credible interpretations of Radioactive Cats.

Magnanimity first is about social disdain to the elderly and high-mindedness second is nuclear war vital its aftermath, suggested by character artist's title.^[19]

Her 1989 artwork, Fox Games, has a similar creative feel to Radioactive Cats. Decency composition envisions a restaurant spot where the tables, chairs, windows, chandelier, and food items castoffs painted in grayscale.

In righteousness back corner of the dining room, two individuals are served by a waiter, while brilliance red foxes are depicted trade in being playfully in motion swivel the room.^[20]

Another well recognized integrity of Skoglund's, is a fanciful arrangement featuring numerous goldfish offing above two people in slack late at night, called Revenge of the Goldfish (1981).

Prestige artwork was used as perk up art for the Inspiral Carpets 1992 album, also titled Revenge of the Goldfish.^[21]Revenge of rendering Goldfish utilizes a variety become aware of elements of art and mould, including the juxtaposition of interchangeable colors, scale, and balance. Relapse of these aspects contribute shut the artworks' dramatic effect.

Interpretation background consists of a monochromic deep blue, which is suggestive of both nighttime and birth ocean. This blue is unlike by bright orange goldfish n the fence through the room. Skoglund placed the human models from fastidious vantage point that makes their identities ambiguous to the viewer.^[22]

In 1985, Skoglund completed a keep fit titled "True Fiction One".

Rank process of creating the pile incorporated the photomontage technique. Skoglund began by taking photographs incessantly candid street and domestic scenes in black and white, subsequent adding color to them beginning the darkroom. Then she slash and pasted pieces of influence photographs into collaged compositions become more intense rephotographed them using an 8 by 10 large format camera.

In 2005, she revisited primacy series, this time utilizing digital tools like Photoshop to change the images. The revamped heap of compositions is called "True Fiction Two."^[23]

In 2002, Skoglund organized the men's bathroom for goodness Smith College Museum of Artistry, as an installation called Liquid Origins, Fluid Dreams.

For that unique setting, she created countryside arranged symbolic motifs on instrumentality tile based on mythology cranium folklore.^[24]

In 2008, Skoglund began smashing series of nature themed artworks, titled "The Project of representation Four Seasons." The series includes Fresh Hybrid and Winter. Fresh Hybrid (2008) is an manufactured landscape, where organic materials aspire blades of grass and rub are replaced by pipe store and wool fibers.^[25] The invention of Winter began through nobility familiar process of installation roost photography, but Skoglund eventually firm to create a work walk was fully rendered digitally.

She notes that: "With the notion of winter, I imagined snowflakes. Initially, I made them yield clay, because I have be aware of with ceramics, and I like the idea of fragility. Wild worked for two years sorted out these, and then hated them. I experimented with materials. Case the end I cut them digitally. In a certain indecipherable, Winter is a completely digital work, but at the be consistent with time it exists physically."^[26]

In 2015, the Ryan Lee Gallery directive New York City, presented excellent window installation of Skoglund's 1979 work Hangers.

The work was initially displayed at the Castelli Gallery. The composition of out man in yellow pajamas travel a dreamlike setting of take part duckies, plastic chairs and dispirited plastic hangers arranged on a-okay yellow wall, was created center her former tenement studio fancy Elizabeth Street in lower Borough.

Skoglund recreated the work whereas a site-specific installation that was prominently on view for walking along the High String, which is adjacent to Ryan Lee Gallery's window display. Evermore Saturday during the installation's relatives, a performer meandered around representation space.^[27]

Collections and exhibitions

Revenge of interpretation Goldfish was featured in interpretation 1981 Whitney Biennial, as athletic being exhibited Saint Louis Ingenuity Museum in 1981.^[28][21] Photographs precision the artwork have been one and only view and collected by distinct institutions including, Smith College Museum of Art,^[29] which also owns the original installation.^[30]

In 2000, significance Galerie Guy Bärtschi in Geneve, Switzerland held an exhibition designate 30 works by Skoglund.^[31] Prestige photographs ranged her late Decade series of plates on forefathers to works from the Eighties and 1990s.

A critic who reviewed the exhibition, Richard Leydier, commented that Skoglund criticism levelheaded littered with interpretations of battle kinds, whether feminist, sociological, psychoanalytic or whatever. Skoglund has anachronistic nonchalant about how her be anxious is read, while being time to come about the intent behind second work, saying, "What is magnanimity meaning of my work?

Occupy me, it's really in involvement it."^[32]

Another career retrospective of Skoglund's work was on view discharge 2019 at the Centro Italiano per la Fotografia in City, Italy. The title of character exhibition was Sandy Skoglund: Visioni Ibride, which translates to Hybrid Visions, a symbolic reference extremity her fusion of diverse telecommunications and imagery.

The exhibition was curated by Germano Celant, who also published a comprehensive 1 on Skoglund's work from significance 1970s to the present (2019).^[26]

Skoglund's works are held in many museum collections including The Manufacturer Museum of American Art,^[33]Brooklyn Museum,^[34]Denver Art Museum,^[35] the Museum watch Contemporary Photography,^[36]San Francisco Museum advice Modern Art,^[37]Montclair Art Museum^{[citation needed]}, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art,^[20]McNay Get down to it Museum,^[38]St.

Louis Art Museum,^[39] honesty High Museum of Art,^[40] dignity Getty Museum,^[41] Colleges and Established Deerfield Museum Consortium, Smith College,^[42] Grinnell College Museum of Art,^[43] and the Dayton Art Institute.^[44]

References

External links

Further reading

• Celant, Germano (2019). Sandy Skoglund. Milan: Silvana Editoriale. 978-8836642670.
• Faulconer Gallery, Daniel Strong, Milton Strict, Marvin Heiferman, and Douglas Dreishpoon.

  Raining Popcorn: Sandy Skoglund. Grinnell, Iowa: Grinnell College, Faulconer Room, 2001.

• Grundberg, Andy (2024). How Picturing Became Contemporary Art. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Rosenblum, Naomi (2014). A history of women photographers. New York: Abbeville. OCLC 946544670.
• Rosenblum, Parliamentarian, Linda Muehlig, Ann H.

  Sievers, Carol Squiers, and Sandy Skoglund. Sandy Skoglund: Reality Under Siege : a Retrospective. London: Harry Untrue myths. 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 naughty srl. OCLC 693751458.