Jersey City–based photographer and installation artist Sandy Skoglund (born 1946) constructs sets featuring handmade sculptures and human characters, achieving the idea of a total work of art. In this way, her works are at once installations, sculptures, collages and, finally, photographs.
Edited by the great Italian curator Germano Celant, this comprehensive monograph, comprised of more than 400 images, compiles Skoglund’s photography, a discipline she broached in the 1970s, while in New York, in order to document her work. Ranging from the earliest photographic series of the mid ’70s (which already feature the characteristic themes of the domestic setting and its transformation into a place of apparitions between the comical and the unsettling) to previously unpublished photographs that the photographer has recently created.
Also included are specimens of the strange creatures that inhabit her photographs, the colorful sculptures of foxes, fish and other animals that play as foils to the otherwise everyday scenes of her tableaux.