Sandy SkoglundMaybe LSD can best be credited for popularizing the sort of effect Sandy Skoglund achieves in her processed photographs and paintings, "True Fiction," on display at Leo Castelli uptown and her installation, "NEO AUTO," at Sharpe. For she takes a clearly defined scene and playfully manipulates the colors, as if with techno knobs, to rearrange our tame expectations. The hue of a face, a carburetor, eyeglasses are chosen to radiate with an unearthly glow, as if these pieces or patches of a scene received the full impact of a cartoon fallout. Entire scene's colors are manipulated. These ultimate enhancements are not disorienting or chilling; rather they make fun disregarding the natural and inclining the scene to a fiesta frenzy of more original coloration, taking the stark edge off her fictions. Parallel Thinking is a typical apartment interior scene except there's a corporate type brandishing a Sunbeam mixer somewhat threateningly at a towel-clad man peering out the apartment door, while a woman's face shmushed up to the front surface casts a concerned but helpless glimpse over her shoulder, spatula in hand. The receding wall planes, all tinted to a glowing orange, almost eliminate perspective, like Matisse's "Red Studio," so all the little signs on the walls and supplies hanging from pegs seem collaged to the same picture surface. Though crowded, it declares its sane immediacy like a morning of Saturday morning cartoons and a diet of Fruit Loops. Having the good fortune of meeting the artist at the gallery, I suggested that I thought it appropriate that her pieces hung on these walls as they are certainly begotten from the ideas of altered color and color patch decoration so industrialized by Andy Warhol and that many of her motifs—household gadgets, supermarket products, corporate men—are recognizable from 60s pop art so championed, marketed and popularized by Leo Castelli. She responded, "I am interested in pop culture. I'm interested in communicating, not in making secret codes that the public doesn't have access to. My intention is not to make stuff for museums and rich people but for everyone. I'm from the middle class and I'm making work for my own class." What she is doing with these common components is entirely new and thrilling, however. She exploits the advantages of photographic composition in much the same way as Degas first did, cutting off foreground objects to emphasize their startling arrangement with the background. She exaggerates even more though and her scale is much grander, so the heads she has a fondness for bringing so upfront to the picture plane are shockingly monolithic. She's stretching the limits of photography and the relationship between painting and illustration. She's had to pioneer some very exacting darkroom techniques: using colored filters in the enlargers and using separate prints for each color which are then combined. And in the hand-painted scenes her proficiency is also exacting: her brushed detail creating a lushness within the cold tightness of the photo-like reality. "I love to get in and render better than a photograph. I'm able to improve it. The freeing is ecstatic, of not having to have all these people in the studio. I'm controlling things while I'm making the picture instead of after." In other works, abandoned and wrecked cars in blown out neighborhoods serve as lush backgrounds for her portrayals of foreigness, placing her corporate men and other suspect types, against them. And what is perhaps most exciting in this show, she's invented a new genre: the office-scape, a subject and locale too rarely explored or attempted by artists though so familiar to a good deal of the population. Though the scenery is familiar and is made almost noble in its firm delineations and billboard scale, there's something askew in the situations: the boss is offering up a steam iron to some deity off screen as one worker looks on and another talks casually on the phone. Likewise, in "NEO AUTO," the installation at Sharpe, the objects are familiar but reassessed like a trans-dimensional overhaul. Here, an actual smashed-up car is completely and evenly coated with a flat, fallout purple. Yellow forks, bent up and tortured looking, have been fused together and, like breeding worms, spill out from every recess. The gallery's floor has been covered with a yellow carpet, the walls painted the same, and shards of photos of the wreckage hang on the walls and ceiling. Though the colors again are a shindig dayglo and the immediate effect is hilarity at this recycling job, the sense of what it is we're seeing soon hits like an aftershock: She's transformed the ultimate throw away object of our consumer society into a sort of icon, an altar piece for the church of the frivolous by-product. So while we laugh and applaud her audacity, she's also forewarning that the specter of this wreckage rises from society's careless disregard. These scenic inventions are one frame cinemas. True Fiction. (unpublished) |