Sandy skoglund photography style
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SANDY SKOGLUND
Learn More about Sandy Skoglund
It is not uncommon for photographers to spend a great deal of time setting up their shot long before they load film into their camera. After an artist selects their subject matter, often they will take hours or even days planning the composition of the shot, arranging and rearranging objects, light sources, or even waiting for the perfect time of day or ideal weather conditions. While it's not unusual for photographers to go through elaborate preparations in the creation of a still life, or "scene", it is unusual for them to completely fabricate life size, artificial environments as their subject.
This is not the case with artist, Sandy Skoglund, who spends months creating large sculptural installations, which she later photographs. Most often, Skoglund creates detailed yet puzzling domestic settings such as bedrooms and living spaces, inhabited by people and sometimes threatened by animals. Although these environments are displayed as temporary exhibits in museums or galleries, most often viewers encounter her work in
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Widely circulated since the 1980s, the colourful, hallucinatory images created by Sandra Louise Skoglund have a touch of the fantastical. After having studied painting at the University of Iowa, she moved to New York in 1972, where she started working as a conceptual artist. In 1974, her first work, inspired by the work of the photographer couple Becher, portrays a series of apparently identical houses, but with only one differing detail. In 1978, she worked on advertising rhetoric and, with her series Food Still Lifes, created still lifes with vibrant, artificial colours made from food placed on tablecloths with geometric patterns (Luncheon Meat on a Counter). Her images became internationally recognised after Radioactive Cats (1980), which shows an elderly couple in a grey kitchen overrun by fluorescent green cats. Staged in her small studio and with her neighbours as actors, the image evokes (as does science-fiction), the intrusion of nature into daily life. The artist photographs imaginary spaces that she invents entirely: an invasion of coat-hangers in a
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Sandy Skoglund was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, in 1946. Her family moved around frequently, following the path of her father working in a large multinational corporation. The early years were spent in New England, and then later they moved to California, where Skoglund graduated from high school.
Skoglund studied studio art and art history at Smith College from 1964-68. As a Junior Year Abroad student to France in 1966-67, Skoglund studied Art History at the Sorbonne and immersed herself in avant-garde cinema, including the French New Wave and Italian NeoRealism that dominated at that time. In 1968, upon graduating from college, Skoglund taught art at Batavia Junior High School in Batavia, Illinois, in order to earn the money to pay for graduate school. One year later, in 1969, Skoglund went on to the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where she studied painting, printmaking, filmmaking, and multimedia, receiving her M.A. in 1971 and her M.F.A. in painting in 1972.
Along with a friend and fellow grad student at Iowa, Skoglund moved to New York in May of 1972, settling at firs
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