..............................................................................................................................................................
|
Radioactive Cats, Revenge of the Goldfish, Maybe Babies and Walking on Eggshells may sound like names of rock bands or movies, but they're really works by Sandy Skoglund '68, whose first retrospective exhibition is currently on display at the Smith College Museum of Art. Skoglund, a photographer, sculptor and installation artist who has been featured in Life magazine as one of the world's top 100 photographers, is best known for her room-sized installations and the photographs based on them. People who have never set foot in a museum recognize Skoglund's photographs because their pop-culture imagery has been widely reproduced on postcards, posters and T-shirts. The Smith show, called "Reality Under Siege," is the first comprehensive survey of Skoglund's career from her early performance and conceptual art to her installations. Skoglund's tableau environments often combine familiar and disturbing elements in domestic or dreamlike settings. Many of them incorporate sculptures of cats, dogs, foxes, rabbits and goldfish. Food also dominates her work, in unlikely roles: jam and marmalade substitute for walls and floor in The Wedding; furniture and figures are covered with cheese puffs in The Cocktail Party; thousands of raisins dot every conceivable surface in Atomic Love; and french fries become a beach for Barbies in At the Shore. In Skoglund's most recent installation, tens of thousands of eggs provide the fragile flooring of Walking on Eggshells, newly commissioned for the Smith retrospective. The lithograph Babies at Paradise Pond, another work created for the exhibition, required the artist to return to Smith for a daylong shoot to photograph oversized baby sculptures (borrowed from the installation Maybe Babies) in rowboats and on the banks of Paradise Pond. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published jointly by the Smith College Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams Inc., Publishers. During its first week at Smith, record-breaking crowds totaling nearly 2,000 visited the exhibition. "Reality Under Siege" will remain at Smith through May 24 before traveling to museums in Cincinnati, Ohio; Columbia, South Carolina; Toledo, Ohio; and Jacksonville, Florida. |
..............................................................................................................................................................
NewsSmith is published
by the Smith College Office of College Relations for alumnae, staff, students
and friends.
Copyright © 1998, Smith College. Portions of this publication may
be reproduced with the permission of the Office
of College Relations, Garrison Hall, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts
01063. Last update: 4/16/98.
Made with Macintosh
