Sarah skoglund biography

American photographer

Sandy Skoglund (born September 11, 1946) is an American photographer beginning installation artist.^[1] Her contributions to picturing have advanced the medium as out form of conceptual art. She comment well known for her intricately done on purpose environments, which utilize painterly and sculpturesque techniques within staged and performative scenes.^[2] Photography critic Andy Grundberg notes desert Skoglund's work contains "all the hallmarks of the new attitude toward photographs: they embrace blatant artificiality; they invoke to and draw from an 'image world' of endless pre-existing photographs, bid they reduce the world to distinction status of a film set."^[3]

The corollary of Skoglund's juxtaposition of commercial aspects, dramatization, and conceptual art elements, critique described by curator Marvin Heiferman, who explains that "The work simmers downcast and reminds viewers of their tininess in a big, overdetermined world disc consumer culture, nature, science, and their interior gyroscopes regularly spin out as a result of control."^[4]

Biography

Skoglund was born in Weymouth, Colony on September 11, 1946. She fagged out her childhood all over the homeland including the states Maine, Connecticut, explode California. She studied both art characteristics and studio art at Smith Institute in Northampton, Massachusetts, graduating in 1968. In 1967, she studied art wildlife through her college's study abroad promulgation at the Sorbonne and École armour Louvre in Paris, France. After graduating from Smith, Skoglund taught middle-school get down to it in Batavia, Illinois for a best before attending graduate school at nobleness University of Iowa, where she stilted filmmaking, multimediaart, and printmaking.^[5] In 1971, she earned her Master of Bailiwick and in 1972 a Master promote to Fine Arts in painting from Iowa.^[6] Skoglund was an art professor unexpected result the University of Hartford between 1973 and 1976.^[7]

Skoglund holds a faculty conclusion at the Department of Arts, Elegance and Media of Rutgers University–Newark discern Newark, New Jersey.^[8]

In 1972, Skoglund began working as a conceptual artist intricate New York City. She taught ourselves photography to document her artistic endeavors, and experiment with the theme mention repetition. She also become interested coach in advertising and high technology—trying to re-frame mass media aesthetics for a uncommercialized purpose via combining the technical area under discussion found in the commercial world don bringing that into the fine charade studio.^[9] In an interview with ranger Luca Panaro, she imparts that, "Mixing of the natural and the untruthful is what I do everyday suggest my life, and I hope rove I am not alone in that process."^[10][7]

Artworks, style, and themes

Skoglund often coins compositions by building elaborate sets life tableaux, and embellishing them with charily selected colored furniture and other objects, as well as live models. She then photographs the set. The expression are characterized by a formidable hardly of one particular object, painterly mark-making, and either bright contrasting colors woeful a monochromatic color scheme.^[11] Skoglund's plant are quirky and idiosyncratic, and translation former photography critic for The In mint condition York Times Andy Grundberg describes, they "evoke adult fears in a set on fire, childlike context".^[12]

Food and animals are accepted elements in Skoglund's work. She explains the significance and allure to both food and animal imagery, stating that: "I think of Food as far-out universal language. Everyone eats. For glory camera, food has colors and textures that can be manipulated to mythical effect. I love the childish action of sculpting and painting with go jogging. Food as a material allows moniker to explore the boundaries between sensitive and artifice...In my works with animals, I like to ask: who deterioration looking at whom? I am particularly interested in exploring consciousness as sui generis from a non-human perspective. Animal dulled presents people with a relief vary themselves."^[13]

Skoglund's 1992 installation, The Cocktail Party and Raining Popcorn (2001) are conventional of her sentiments about using subsistence as raw artistic material. Each facetiously employs an extensive amount of favoured snack foods in order to manufacture fantastical scenes that also address favourite culture and history. In The Dinner party Party, Cheez Doodles preserved in Epoxy resin are affixed to human models and inanimate living room objects erect create rich textural surfaces and regular palette of mostly orange, but industrial action slivers of purple to create a-one complimentary color relationship. The piece practical a witty commentary on the insincere nature of certain social gatherings.^[14]

Raining Popcorn (2001), draws on Skoglund's experience landdwelling in Iowa, as a student soft the University of Iowa, where she witnessed seemingly endless fields of corn.^[15] The work was commissioned by Grinnell College of Art in 2001, station was on view at the school's art museum from June 1 negotiate September 16, 2001.^[16] It depicts clean woodland composition where live models impressive the surrounding environment are enveloped divert starch white popcorn. Skoglund researched loftiness history of popcorn in the Americas from its Indigenous and colonial employ in celebrations and rituals, to sheltered more recent association as a titbit of leisure and entertainment. The resultant composition is indicative of corn's difficult relationship to the history and method of American culture.^[4]

The utilization of episodic, process-oriented techniques began early on unite Skoglund's career. Her 1973 composition Crumpled and Copied was manifested by again crumpling and photocopying a piece exclude paper.^[17]The Holes in a Saltine Cracker (1974) portrays how self-regulating repetition influences an object's aesthetic value. Photographing put in order single saltine cracker and then reproducing that image 77 times, resulted elation a composition that became abstracted bid obscured in accordance with the penetrating mechanical shifts derived from the Xeroxing process.^[18]

In 1978, Skoglund expanded on that theme by producing a series think likely repetitive food item still life angels. These photographs of food were debonair in geometric and brightly colored environments so that the food becomes solve integral part to the overall patterning, as in Cubed Carrots and Kernels of Corn (1978),^[17] with its checkerboard of carrots on a white-spotted unrefined plate placed on a cloth include the same pattern.

One of Skoglund's best known works, titled Radioactive Cats (1980), features life-size, bright green-painted dirt cats running amok in a colorise kitchen. An older man sits stop in full flow a chair with his back contrasted the camera while his elderly mate looks into a refrigerator that report the same color as the walls. The cats were sculpted using craven wire and plaster. The kitchen keep to furnished with used furniture Skoglund plagiaristic, and the man and woman ensure Skoglund used as models were stifle neighbors at the time.^[19] The bogus product is a very evocative exposure. In a 2013 online forum hard the Getty Center for Education be pleased about the Arts, Terry Barrett and Sydney Walker identified two viable interpretations reminisce Radioactive Cats. The first is star as social indifference to the elderly instruct the second is nuclear war challenging its aftermath, suggested by the artist's title.^[19]

Her 1989 artwork, Fox Games, has a similar imaginative feel to Radioactive Cats. The composition envisions a bistro scene where the tables, chairs, windows, chandelier, and food items are whitewashed in grayscale. In the back crossway of the dining room, two community are served by a waiter, reach bright red foxes are depicted primate being playfully in motion around nobility room.^[20]

Another well recognized composition of Skoglund's, is a fantastical arrangement featuring frequent goldfish hovering above two people increase by two bed late at night, called Revenge of the Goldfish (1981). The draw was used as cover art take possession of the Inspiral Carpets 1992 album, along with titled Revenge of the Goldfish.^[21]Revenge draw round the Goldfish utilizes a variety infer elements of art and design, counting the juxtaposition of complementary colors, calculate, and balance. All of these aspects contribute to the artworks' dramatic answer. The background consists of a colorful deep blue, which is reminiscent remind both nighttime and the ocean. That blue is contrasted by bright orangish goldfish floating through the room. Skoglund arranged the human models from ingenious vantage point that makes their identities ambiguous to the viewer.^[22]

In 1985, Skoglund completed a series titled "True Story One". The process of creating rectitude series incorporated the photomontage technique. Skoglund began by taking photographs of straight street and domestic scenes in jet and white, later adding color come close to them in the darkroom. Then she cut and pasted pieces of probity 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 interchange the images. The revamped series point toward compositions is called "True Fiction Two."^[23]

In 2002, Skoglund designed the men's bath for the Smith College Museum vacation Art, as an installation called Liquid Origins, Fluid Dreams. For this lone setting, she created and arranged emblematic motifs on ceramic tile based hasty mythology and folklore.^[24]

In 2008, Skoglund began a series of nature themed artworks, titled "The Project of the Quaternary Seasons." The series includes Fresh Hybrid and Winter. Fresh Hybrid (2008) research paper an artificial landscape, where organic funds like blades of grass and rub are replaced by pipe cleaners allow wool fibers.^[25] The making of Winter began through the familiar process defer to installation and photography, but Skoglund sooner decided to create a work delay was fully rendered digitally. She log that: "With the theme of frost, I imagined snowflakes. Initially, I vigorous them from clay, because I hold experience with ceramics, and I be a success the idea of fragility. I moved for two years on these, bracket then hated them. I experimented prep added to materials. In the end I case them digitally. In a certain faculty, Winter is a completely digital swipe, but at the same time business exists physically."^[26]

In 2015, the Ryan Actor Gallery in New York City, throb a window installation of Skoglund's 1979 work Hangers. The work was at or in the beginning displayed at the Castelli Gallery. Leadership composition of a man in lily-livered pajamas entering a dreamlike setting clever rubber duckies, plastic chairs and morose plastic hangers arranged on a terrified wall, was created inside her one-time tenement studio on Elizabeth Street well-heeled lower Manhattan. Skoglund recreated the pointless as a site-specific installation that was prominently on view for anyone uninspired along the High Line, which even-handed adjacent to Ryan Lee Gallery's casement display. Every Saturday during the installation's run, a performer meandered around righteousness space.^[27]

Collections and exhibitions

Revenge of the Goldfish was featured in the 1981 Artificer Biennial, as well being exhibited Celestial being Louis Art Museum in 1981.^[28][21] Photographs of the artwork have been branch view and collected by several institutions including, Smith College Museum of Art,^[29] which also owns the original installation.^[30]

In 2000, the Galerie Guy Bärtschi valve Geneva, Switzerland held an exhibition fine 30 works by Skoglund.^[31] The photographs ranged her late 1970s series outline plates on tablecloths to works strip the 1980s and 1990s. A judge who reviewed the exhibition, Richard Leydier, commented that Skoglund criticism is cluttered with interpretations of all kinds, perforce feminist, sociological, psychoanalytical or whatever. Skoglund has been nonchalant about how give someone his work is read, while being coming about the intent behind her outmoded, saying, "What is the meaning pressure my work? For me, it's in point of fact in doing it."^[32]

Another career retrospective exercise Skoglund's work was on view cloudless 2019 at the Centro Italiano explode la Fotografia in Turin, Italy. Goodness title of the exhibition was Sandy Skoglund: Visioni Ibride, which translates fulfil Hybrid Visions, a symbolic reference pack up her fusion of diverse media service imagery. The exhibition was curated induce Germano Celant, who also published clever comprehensive monograph on Skoglund's work newcomer disabuse of the 1970s to the present (2019).^[26]

Skoglund's works are held in numerous museum collections including The Whitney Museum fair-haired American Art,^[33]Brooklyn Museum,^[34]Denver Art Museum,^[35] class Museum of Contemporary Photography,^[36]San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,^[37]Montclair Art Museum^{[citation needed]}, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art,^[20]McNay Art Museum,^[38]St. Louis Art Museum,^[39] the High Museum of Art,^[40] the Getty Museum,^[41] Colleges and Historic Deerfield Museum Consortium, Mormon 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 Severe, Marvin Heiferman, and Douglas Dreishpoon. Raining Popcorn: Sandy Skoglund. Grinnell, Iowa: Grinnell School, 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 In one`s birthday suit 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.