Sandy Skoglund
American, born 1946
American photographer, sculptor and installation artist. She studied at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts between 1964 and 1968, spending time in Paris where she studied art history in 1966–7. Between 1969 and 1972 she studied at the University of Iowa, graduating with an MFA. Her works in the early 1970s were conceptual pieces, for example Crumpled and Copied (1973; see 1998 exh. cat., p. 22), in which she repeatedly crumpled and photocopied a piece of paper. In the mid-1970s Skoglund began to take photographs of food presented in geometric and brightly coloured surroundings so that the food becomes an integral part to the overall patterning, as in Cubed Carrots and Kernels of Corn (1978; see 1992 exh. cat.). Her use of brightly coloured interiors expanded into photographs of whole room installations, in which she would use domestic objects repeatedly, flattening out the photographed space. In the early 1980s Skoglund began to sculpt the repeated elements in her installations, as in Radioactive Cats (1980; Smith College, MA), in which lime green cats overrun a grey kitchen. During the 1980s Skoglund began to exhibit her installations as well as the photographs of the installations, continuing to use animals and food as the key repeating motifs. In the 1990s the visceral and tactile qualities of her installations became dominant, with a more muted palette being used to create a surreal effect similar to her earlier work, as in Body Limits (1992; see 1998 exh. cat., p. 46), in which male and female dummies are covered in strips of bacon, as are the walls and floor of the room in which they are standing.
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