I personally think that they are about reality, not really dream reality, but reality itself. I know when I went to grad school, the very first day at the University of Iowa, the big chief important professor comes in, looks at my work and says, You have to loosen up. And so I really decided that he was wrong and that I was just going to be tighter, as tight as I could possibly be. Its a specific material that actually the consumer wouldnt know about. Youre a prime example of everything that youve done leading up to this comes into play with your work. We found popcorn poppers in the southwest. And that process of repetition, really was a process of trying to get better at the sculpture, better at the mimicist. Born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, Sandy Skoglund moved around the U.S. during her childhood. I was a studio assistant in Sandy's studio on Brooke st. when this was built. Luntz: Okay, so the floor is what marmalade, right? Luntz: Okay so this one, Revenge of the Goldfish and Early Morning. Skoglund: I think youre totally right. She injects her conceptual inquiries into the real world by fabricating objects and designing installations that subvert reality and often presents her work on metaphorical and poetic levels. By 1981, these were signature elements in your work, which absolutely continue until the present. Luntz: This one is a little more menacing Gathering Paradise. So, is it meant to be menacing? For me, I just loved the fun of it the activity of finding all of these things, working with these things.. And the squirrels are preparing for winter by running around and collecting nuts and burying them. Sandy Skoglund studied studio art and art history at Smith College and attended graduate school at the University of Iowa where she studied filmmaking, intaglio printmaking, and multimedia art, receiving her M.A. You have to create the ability to change your mind quickly. So, I think its whatever you want to think about it. In 1972, Skoglund began working as a conceptual artist in New York City. You have to understand how to build a set in three dimensions, how to see objects in sculpture, in three dimensions, and then how to unify them into the two-dimensional surface of a photograph. And its a deliberate attention to get back again to popular culture with these chicks, similar to Walking on Eggshells with the rabbits. You continue to learn. What they see and what they think is important, but what they feel is equally important to you. My first thought was to make the snowflakes out of clay and I actually did do that for a couple of years. You wont want to miss this one hour zoom presentation with Sandy Skoglund. But then I felt like you had this issue of wanting to show weather, wanting to show wind. Luntz: And this time they get outside to go to Paris. The thrill really of trying to do something original is that its never been done before. These chicks fascinate me. Through working with various mediums, from painting and photography to sculpture and installation, she captures the imaginations of generations of collectors and art enthusiasts, new and old. But they just became unwieldy and didnt feel like snowflakes. The works are characterized by an overwhelming amount of one object and either bright, contrasting colors or a monochromatic color scheme. You know Polaroid is gone, its a whole new world today. Im always interested and I cant sort of beat the conceptual artists out of me completely. Luntz: Breathing Glass is a beautiful, beautiful piece. Skoglund is an american artist. What am I supposed to do? Her large-format photographs of the impermanent installations she creates have become synonymous with bending the ordinary perception of photography since the 1970s. Though her work might appear digitally altered, all of Skoglund's effects are in-camera. Sandy Skoglund, a multi-media, conceptual artist whose several decades of work have been very influential, introduced new ideas, and challenged simple categorizations, is one of those unique figures in contemporary art. Skoglund's works are quirky and idiosyncratic, and as former photography critic for The New York Times Andy Grundberg describes, they "evoke adult fears in a playful, childlike context". She painstakingly creates objects for their part in a constructed environment. I mean, what is a dream? You have this wonderful reputation. About America being a prosperous society and about being a consumptive based society where people are basically consumers of all of these sort of popular foods? Even the whole idea of popcorn to me is interesting because popcorn as a sort of celebratory, positive icon goes back to the early American natives. Its the picture. Luntz: And its an example, going back from where you started in 1981, that every part of the photograph and every part of the constructed environment has something going on. Indeed, Sandy Skoglund began to embrace her position as a tour de force in American con- temporary art in the late 1970s. If the models were doing something different and the camera rectangle is different, does, do the outtake images mean something slightly different from the original image? So these three people were just a total joy to work. Luntz: This one, I love the piece. I dont know, it kind of has that feeling. Thats my brother and his wife, by the way. Featuring the bright colors, patterns and processed foods popular in that decade, the work captures something quintessentially American: an aspirational pursuit of an ideal. Some of the development of it? Eventually, she graduated from Smith College with a degree in art history and studio art and, in due course, pursued a masters degree in painting at the University of Iowa. They get outside. And its only because of the way our bodies are made and the way that we have controlled our environment that weve excluded or controlled the chaos. After graduating in 1969, she went to graduate school at the University of Iowa, where she studied filmmaking, multimedia art, and printmaking. I think that what youve always wanted to do in the work is that you want every photograph of every installation to be a complete statement. Her works are held in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Contemporary Photography,[9] San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,[10] Montclair Art Museum and Dayton Art Institute.[11]. Luntz: So if we go to the next picture, for most collectors of photography and most people that understand Contemporary Photography, we understand that this was a major picture. The work continues to evolve. So that concept where the thing makes itself is sort of part of what happens with me. In the late 19th century, upon seeing a daguerreotype photo for the first time, French artist Paul Delaroche declared, From today, painting is dead. Since the utterance of that statement, contemporary art has been influenced by this rationale. A full-fledged artist whose confluence of the different disciplines in art gives her an unparalleled aesthetic, Skoglund ultimately celebrates popular culture almost as the world around us that we take for granted. And no, I really dont see it that way. Where the accumulation, the masses of the small goldfish are starting to kind of take revenge on the human-beings in the picture. So the answer to that really has to be that the journey is what matters, not the end result. Skoglund: No, no, that idea was present in the beginning for me. Ill just buy a bunch of them and see what I can do with them when I get them back to the studio. This idea that the image makes itself is yet another kind of process. So the installation itself, it still exists and is on view right now. This idea of filing up the space, horror vacui is called in the Roman language means fear of empty space, so the idea that nature abhors a vacuum. They go to the drive-in. So there are mistakes that I made that probably wouldnt have been made if I had been trained in photography. With this piece the butterflies are all flying around. But I love them and theyre wonderful and the more I looked into it, doing research, because I always do research before I start a project, theres always some kind of quasi-scientific research going on. Its something theyve experienced and its a way for them to enter into the word. Luntz: Shimmering Madness is a picture that weve had in the gallery and clients love it. Its chaos. Kodak canceled the production of the dye that Skoglund was using for her prints. Theyre very tight pictures. So that kind of nature culture thing, Ive always thought that is very interesting. Luntz:So, before we go on, in 1931 there was a man by the name of Julian Levy who opened the first major photography gallery in the United States. So that was the journey, the learning journey that youre talking about and the sculptures are sculpted in the computer using ZBrush program. So the first thing I worked with in this particular piece is what makes a snowflake look like a flake versus a star or something else. What kind of an animal does it look like? So I probably made about 30 or 40 plaster cats and I ended up throwing out quite a few, little by little, because I hated them. And I remember after the shoot, going through to pick the ones that I liked the best. Im very interested in popular culture and how the intelligentsia deals with popular culture that, you know, theres kind of a split. Her large-format photographs of the impermanent installations she creates have become synonymous with bending the ordinary perception of photography since the 1970s. But to say that youre a photographer is to sell you short, because obviously you are a sculptor, youre a conceptual artist, youre a painter, you have, youre self-taught in photography but you are a totally immersive artist and when you shoot a room, the room doesnt exist. And for people that dont know, it could have been very simple, you could have cut out these leaves with paper, but its another learning and youre consistently and always learning. All of the work thats going on is the chaos and then the people inside are just there, the same way we are in our lives. I would take the Polaroids home at the end of the day and then draw on them, like what to do next for the next day. Skoglund: Theyre all different and handmade in stoneware. In 2008, Skoglund completed a series titled "True Fiction Two". Thats all I know, thousands of years ago. You were in a period of going to art school, trained as a painter, you had interest in literature, you worked in jobs where you decorated cakes, worked in fast food restaurants. The armature of the people connected to them. Skoglund: Which I love. You could have bought a sink. And I think, for me, that is one of the main issues for me in terms of creating my own individual value system within this sort of overarching Art World. This was the rupture that I had with conceptualism and minimalism, which which I was deeply schooled in in the 70s. Skoglunds fame as a world-renowned artist grew as a result of her conceptual work, with an aesthetic that defied a concentration on any one medium and used a variety of mixed media to create visually striking installations. Ultimately, these experiences greatly influenced the formation of her practice. Her work often incorporates sculpture and installation . The the snake is an animal that is almost universally repulsive or not a positive thing. She is part of our exhibition, which centers around six different photographers who shoot interiors, but who shoot them with entirely different reasons and different strategies for how they work. Mainly in the sense that what reality actually is is chaos. She began her art practice in 1972 in New York City, where she experimented with Conceptualism, an art movement that dictated that the idea or concept of the artwork was more important than the art object itself. She attended Smith . Sandy Skoglund (American, b.1946) is a conceptual artist working in photography and installation. And in our new picture from the outtakes, the title itself, Chasing Chaos actually points the viewer more towards the meaning of the work actually, in which human beings, kind of resolutely are creating order through filing cabinets and communication and mathematical constructs and scientific enterprise, all of this rational stuff. I mean, you go drive across the United States and you see these shopping centers. This project is similar to the "True Fiction" series that she began in 1986. You know, theyre basically alone together. Sandy Skoglund is an American photographer and installation artist who creates surrealist images by building elaborate sets or tableaux. Meaning the chance was, well here are all these plastic spoons at the store. The carefully crafted environments become open-ended narratives where art, nature, and domestic spaces collide to explore the things we choose to surround ourselves within society. Sandy studied both art history and studio art at Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts. And yet, if you put it together in a caring way and you can see them interacting, I just like that cartoon quality I guess. Skoglund:Yeah, it is. Meaning the chance was, well here are all these plastic spoons at the store. They are the things you leave behind when you have to make choices. These remaining artists represented art that transcends any one medium, pushing the social and cultural boundaries of the time. Luntz: And the last image is an outtake of Shimmering Madness.. Thats how this all came about. And when the Norton gave you an exhibition, they brought in Walking on Eggshells. When I originally saw the piece, there were two people that came through it, I think they were dressed at the Norton, but they walked through and they actually broke the eggshells. These are done in a frantic way, these 8 x 10 Polaroids, which Im not using anymore. My favorite part of the outtake of this piece called Sticky Thrills, is that the woman on the left is actually standing up and on her feet you can see the jelly beans stuck to the bottom of her foot. So, are you cool with the idea or not? She is a complex thinker and often leaves her work open to many interpretations. Its actually on photo foil. And I sculpted the foxes in there and then I packed everything up and then did this whole construct in the same space. Meanings come from the interaction of the different objects there and what our perception is. Exhibition Nov 12 - December 13, 2022 -- Artist Talk Saturday Nov 26, at 10 am.
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