Sandy Skoglund is a conceptual artist whose interest in photocopying and mark-making lead her to teach herself photography. She has works that are being held at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Dayton Art Institute. Her work Breathing Glass has a permanent installation at the Lowe Art Museum, this piece shown above with the blue room lined with moving glass dragonflies on the walls. Skoglund goes about her process by creating these environments where she can photograph the process and the end result, which become these surrealist environments. She is best known for her work entitled, Radioactive Cats seen above. This picture shows clay neon green cats creating havoc in an elderly couples apartment. Everything that is in the image is purposefully placed and made the by the artist’s hand. The people are afterthoughts to her real purpose, which are the repetition of these clay cats. Her work entitled Hybrid was the last piece she created which involved walls made of pipe cleaners and trees with leaves made of birds shown above is a detail image and the finished image of the tripped out landscape. These images show the great amount of time that goes into creating each surreal environment; she randomly places real people in the photos to contrast the world she’s created. My personal favorite of her works is the piece entitled, Walking on Eggshells, made in 1997 this piece shows two woman naked in this bizarre restroom where the tiles on the wall are each hand painted and the floor is lined with eggs and the snakes slither through making it seem like a story of Adam and Eve. This image encompasses all that Skoglund does in her works. She has taken photography to another world where she makes the rules and creates the realities of her dreams. I find her work to be very intriguing and inventive and surreal. Her work shows that there is no end to the possibilities that can come from photography as a medium. Her use of mixed media and conceptualist ideas brings together a body of work that is quite wonderful to look at. For more information on this artist please visit the artist’s website at:
http://www.sandyskoglund.com/
Sandy Skoglund's work begins at juxtapositions; of ideas, of materials, and of results. Her work may not be as deep in meaning as other artists but for conceptual art, she does put the viewer on notice and makes the viewer think about how she's pulled off some of the images. Her wonderfully imaginative environments are riddled with contrasting ideas, such as the Walking on Eggshells piece that portrays both the good and evil in the animal figures and the vulnerable positions of the two woman in the background play off the fragile eggs on the floor bringing the viewer into the image like they were a voyeur into this intimate world she's created for us.
ReplyDeleteThe most striking thing for me in these photographs is the color. The colors are so intense they seem to bypass my eyes and directly imprint themselves on my brain. They give unity to disorder by becoming the most natural thing in an unnatural world.
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