fotografiska

Sandy Skoglund

The photograph, for much of its history, represented the pillar of truth and objectivity. It was a material document of a moment in time. However, the advent of the digital ­revolution has changed our perception of the photographic image. Since the arrival of digital editing, we, more often than not, question its authenticity. We no longer instinctively believe in the photograph as an index or imprint of reality. Which makes it of utmost ­interest to revisit the work of photographers like American artist Sandy Skoglund.

Skoglund, who is of Swedish descent, is a pioneer of the reinvention of tableau vivant photography also referred to as staged photography. She belongs to an energetic set of artists that have been active in the United States since the 1970s, such as Cindy Sherman and Joel-Peter Witkin. Like a scenographer who crafts sets for the theater, Skoglund creates elaborate and colorful environments. Her installations are the culmination of months of planning and construction. Each installation is a work of art in its own right, which is then photographed with a large-format camera.

Skoglund represents a time when artists began to transverse mediums. Previously, photography was largely dominated by documentary work. Constructions created for the photograph, by artists like Skoglund, were seldom encountered. In fact, when we believed in the authenticity of the photograph, Skoglund’s pictures astonished us because we viewed them as documents. Before digital editing, one understood that Skoglund’s figures were sculpted, rooms were built up and painted, and each detail was touched by the hand of artist.

Skoglund’s dreamlike imagery continues to intrigue us. Her work is grounded in the experience of suburban middle class living. Skoglund was a vivacious and creative child, who felt strangely marginalized within the conformity of life in small town America. Consequently, her complex investigations of domestic environments often depict the world constructed by man in opposition to nature. For example, the animals in Skoglund’s work appear like spirits among the human inhabitants, who seem oblivious to their existence. As nature encroaches, it appears that we deny the very thing of which we are a part.

Skoglund highlights the idiosyncrasy of our manufactured world, as depicted in her still life of cubed carrots laid out in neat little rows on a polka dot plate. Her pop-art palette references the artificial materiality of our own constructed world, and the tivoli that is our consumption. Her imagery is enthralling, and yet we instinctively sense falseness in the frivolity. Human ingenuity is depicted as both imaginative and dysfunctional, an anomaly within the natural balance of ecosystems. Skoglund comments on what we have sought to suppress via the joys of consumption, our subservience to and our fear of the natural world.

- Chief Curator Michelle Marie Roy