Sandy Skoglund at Janet Borden - Brief Article

For her latest installation, Sandy Skoglund solidly paved a depressed platform with brightly colored, enamel-covered jelly beans. A black-painted wall to the right and another that divided the platform in half were densely overspreaded with little synthetic, pastel-hued butterflies, their iridescent wings painted with tiny curlicues. Four mannequins, sum of two units male and two female, all with their heads spun backward and also completely overspreaded with the multicolored candies, walked and leapt [i]or[/i] part of to the other her obsessively created wonderland.

Periodically, a battery-operated device installed somewhere in the Walls tripped springs that place the butterfly wings aflutter and filled the space with a fabulous twittering. For all the delicacy of the visual experience, one's skin crawled with the anticipation of the little beauties alighting upon one's flesh, and the din brought to mind something les cute than butterflies, more like a plague of locusts.

authentic to Skoglund's established practice, there was an accompanying Cibachrome print of her installation with real tribe in it (a limited edition of which was the commodity at hand, since her actual installations rarely sell) Chaperoned through two of the jelly-bean mannequins, the sum of two units pale humans in the photograph are naked and, with bald heads and awkwardly held limbs, they bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to their plastic counterparts.

Skoglund's previous installations were situated in mundane environs like the office, bathroom or kitchen, inhabited by dint of ordinary people going about their quotidian business, oblivious to the vicinity of such unlikely entities as white "radioactive" cats and flying goldfish. These haunting tableaux had the vividness of a child's fantasy of a mysterious, undiscovered world that takes over when we're not paying attention. The jelly-bean and butterfly combination, however, lacks similar impact, perhaps because it does not tease us through pointing to the unused potential of the imagination.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group