Sandy Skoglund

Sandy Skoglund is a photographer and installation artist who creates very surreal pieces of work by building sets that are very elaborate and take a long time to make.
From looking at her work from her earliest stuff to her more recent I can see that there a few running themes the most striking one is repetitiveness, a lot of her work includes repeating patterns or objects, her work most of the time will contain either people, animals and sometimes food and sometimes more than one of these things at a time. Most of her images or sets are usually very bright in colouring and a lot of the time she uses a bright colour in contrast with another or other bright colours or a bright colour against a more plain or monochrome background. I've also noticed that in some of her installations she will have people that are made completely of a material or covered in a pattern and then she will have real people as well and this is all part of her merging the real with the unreal. 

I think it links to the uncanny in the way she makes things in the image of real things but by creating them out of non real or living objects. Particularly in one of her recent works 'Fresh Hybrid' (2008) From a distance if you look at the picture, apart from the colours, everything looks quite normal but on closer inspection you can see that the sky or background is made from thousands of pipe cleaners bunched together, the leaves on the trees are yellow chicks. She has also merged nature with people because the tree stumps are made to look like a persons legs. Again she has real people in there which for me creates an interesting contrast against the sculpted and made up people. For the photographs she uses real people and for the installations she uses mannequins. 
I think her sets look very inviting, like a magical world you just want to step into and I think you would get a very different perspective of her work if you were standing within it because you would be able to see all the details up close when from the picture all you see is everything merged together to create one view. I think you would be able to create some interesting films or film ideas from them as well as they do stir up the imagination.

 
 


I find her work really creative and interesting and admire how much painstaking time and effort she must have put into creating each piece. I like all the elements she uses as well, the bright colours are very appealing and grab you're attention, the weirdness of the pieces is very captivating and I like how she uses animals as well.








Sources:

My Modern Met [Internet] http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/incredibly-elaborate-non-photoshopped-scenes - Accessed 7/3/2013
Sandy Skoglund [Internet] http://www.sandyskoglund.com/ - Accessed 7/3/2013