Title: "Radioactive Cats"
Artist: Sandy Skoglund
Medium: Installation art, photography
Era: 1980 CE
Surrealist (?), Installation art
I've decided to start out with what may be my favorite overall piece of artwork. Radioactive cats is a piece built by Sandy Skoglund in which a setting is created with a very specific color scheme of grays and neon greens. Skoglund spent months creating the set, and once finished photographed the piece complete with actors. The cats and much of the set were created with chicken wire and plaster, and finally painted.
Skoglund's artwork is often filled with average scenes populated with swarms of animals. In a 1998 interview with Demetrio Paparoni (http://www.sandyskoglund.com/pages/published/pages_publish/demetrio.html) Skoglund stated of this concept, "Since we, as human beings, consider ourselves the primary form of consciousness existing in nature, I decided to populate my images with animals in order to introduce this alternative awareness into our experience". Her images do not always contain repeated animals however, in her earlier work she experiments with the repetition of food and her most recent work deals with the creation of artificial landscapes.
Many people consider Skoglund's work to be surrealistic in nature, as the scenes have a very dream-like state. However, Skoglund does not believe this to be so. She says that her work presents realistic scenes with one unreal element, the animals. This is why Skoglund does not digitally manipulate her images, it is important to her concept that one knows the scene is a photograph of a real event. This image really happened, and is preserved forever in a photograph.
One interesting thing about "Radioactive Cats" is that a sketch of Skoglund's original idea is on her website. The original idea, "Magic Cats" included cats which changed color as they approached the woman's face. The old man, or possibly the old woman, would be presented with a young face in order to create a psychological angle to her work.
Other interesting work by Skoglund includes "Revenge of the Goldfish", "Fox Games" and one of her more recent works, "Fresh Hybrid". Skoglund's work is documented on her website, http://www.sandyskoglund.com
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