Book dossier

Sandy Skoglund

by Sandy Skoglund, Abrams

Sandy Skoglund has been in the forefront of contemporary art in the United States and abroad for nearly two decades, bridging the boundaries between sculpture, installation art, and photography. She has consistently delighted and astonished audiences with witty, puzzling, and intriguing room-sized environments, sometimes peopled with human models or mannequins and often filled with animal sculptures, which also appear in her photographs and prints. Among her best known works are Radioactive Cats (an array of ravenous green cats in an all-gray kitchen), and Revenge of the Goldfish (a nightmarish aquariumlike bedroom in which huge, red-orange goldfish swim in the air and over every surface). Skoglund's reality-teasing innovations have even included using food as the sculptor's material. Her 1992 installation The Cocktail Party featured a gathering of partygoers covered in cheese puffs; another work called Body Limits offered two figures wrapped in raw bacon strips. Often exhibited in solo shows of installations, prints, and photographs as well as in group exhibitions of photography, Sandy Skoglund had never been given a retrospective until the museum of art at her alma mater, Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, prepared the career-wide survey on which this book is based. For the exhibition, Skoglund made three new works of art: a lithograph, Babies at Paradise Pond, which she created on the Smith campus in 1995; a new installation for the retrospective's premiere in March 1998 called Walking on Eggshells; and a photograph of the installation made in her New York studio.