SANDY SKOGLUND
American
Almost immediately after the debut of her first
installations and photographs featuring intensely
colored sculptures in artist-constructed environ-
ments, Skoglund experienced the overnight success
associated with the 1980s art world. Within a year
of the introduction ofRadioactive Cats(1980), Sko-
glund had a show sold out before its opening at
Castelli Gallery and was included in the 1981 Whit-
ney Biennial. Since this recognition, Skoglund has
created many compelling installations and photo-
graphic works that reflect the sensuality and latent
neuroticism of American consumerism and domes-
tic life.
Skoglund counts her teenage years growing up
in Southern California, working as a waitress in
Disneyland and decorating cakes on an assembly
line, as formative experiences that introduced her
to artificial realities. Foreshadowing her later in-
stallations, she spent the early 1970s working
through conceptual and systems art making obses-
sive and repetitious works. In 1974, she made her
first photographs—serial images of motel cottages.
Taking cues from culinary photography, in 1978
Skoglund made her first photographs from still-
lifes she constructed.
Since 1980, Skoglund’s installations and photo-
graphs have had a popular appeal because of their
recognizable subject matter, formal beauty, and
sensuous color and materials. They are acknowl-
edged by critics and scholars as engaging in a social
critique of consumption and raising compelling
questions about mediation. In addition, Skoglund’s
best-known works are dreamscapes that evoke the
uncanny through obsessively repeated and pat-
terned objects and images.
The relationship between Skoglund’s sculptural
installations and photographs is especially prob-
lematic and worthy of note. Skoglund creates con-
structed tableaux of myriad materials but often
featuring animal sculptures hand-made by the
artist. Each environment is then composed in con-
sideration of a photograph that will include human
actors. Though Skoglund’s work is best known
through limited-edition, Cibachrome color photo-
graphs, the artist maintains many of her con-
structed spaces, recomposing their elements in
consideration of their three dimensionality. Often,
these installations and photographs are exhibited
side-by-side, thus raising questions about the rela-
tionships of these objects. Skoglund accepts both as
artistic outputs that are related, but that function
independently. The photographs lack compelling
three dimensionality, but the installations lack the
singular, composed image and actors that seem to
‘‘complete’’ the photographs through the addition
of an overtly human dimension. Some of Sko-
gland’s installations, such as that forSpirituality in
the Flesh(1992), are made of ephemeral materials,
and the photograph becomes a record of a tempor-
ary tableau.
Skoglund’s graphic works include photolitho-
graphs based on images of her sculptures placed
in ‘‘real’’ landscapes such as the Asbury Park
oceanfront ofDogs at the Beach(1992) and the
car park ofSquirrels at the Drive-In(1996). Her
other major foray into graphics is True Fiction
(1986), a portfolio of 20 dye-transfer prints that
are collaged images from Skoglund’s photographs
of New York City, friends, and family airbrushed
onto canvas and then rephotographed.
The human figures included in Skoglund’s photo-
graphs give a sense of scale but are intriguing be-
cause of their secondary importance in dioramas
that visually overwhelm the models through high-
key and high-contrast colors, and optical patterns
created through repeated elements. For instance,
The Cocktail Party(1992) is a living room envi-
ronment covered from floor to ceiling with bright
orange cheese puffs. The four models staged in this
photograph wear clothing covered with this same
junk food and are juxtaposed with human-sized
mannequins that are uncanny and mute ciphers
composed of this overtly artificial snack. The ac-
tors’ exposed faces and legs comprise a tiny portion
of the overall composition. As in most Skoglund
works, these figures have their humanity compro-
mised by an obviously fake, yet sensually real envi-
ronment—this existential crisis is heightened by
their disaffected, even somnambulistic expressions
and lack of interaction. In this way, Skoglund calls
attention to the American situation within, and
even preference for, alienating ersatz environments.SKOGLUND, SANDY