Sandy Skoglun

MAGIC TIME
Cold shivering people in a scenery submerged by candid snow where every magic flake is constituted by popcorn bits… A drawing room with an old style American chimney lined with green grass for the enjoyment of the countless cartoon like violet dogs that placidly and unexpectedly peopled it. An enchanted little grove with anthropoid trees joyfully hopping on “legs” and flaunting strange flowers made up by thousands of yellow chicks blossoming from the branches…[1]

Often I am asked why I do not produce my images with a computer: it would change the meaning. To know that what we are looking at has really existed, changes our perception of the image. Think of Hollywood movies: if we know that the backgrounds are created by a computer our felt experience of the scene changes. An electronically constructed image is perceived in a different way than o photographic image. I’m not against the computer as an instrument in itself but, with regards my work, the mirror image of the installations, and the photographs as a decisive importance.[2]
Sandy Skoglund

To define her work is not an easy task. Are they sculptures, or perhaps installations, or photographs of installations and sculptures? Is everything shown real? Obviously so, but not in a commonly intended sense: they are rather True Fiction. In fact nothing is manipulated with the photoshop and everything is shown as it really is. In Gathering Paradise 1991 we watch invasion in to the garden of a typical American house of hundreds pitch-black crows and squirrels. But she is the one who painted the ground and the house of an improbable pink confetto and to personally realize, with an infinite care and helped by some assistants, all the animals and the objects that appear in the image. Animals a bit in a Disneyland style showing up for what they are, resin sculptures.Having created her magic landscape, and having inserted some real people seemingly living such corner of wonder world in absolutely normality, Sandy takes numerous snaps to choose but one. One only large lasted a whole year to create such places, a bit dreaming a bit nightmarish.[1]