The Janet Borden Gallery presents The Outtakes by Sandy Skoglund.
When Skoglund began making her installations in the early 1980s, she likely didn’t think of herself and her art as “pre” anything; today, one of the simplest, and most reductive ways to think about Skoglund is that she was gloriously “pre-digital manipulation” or “pre-Photoshop”, painstakingly hand building every eccentric detail before digital software tools and AI made such flights of fancy more commonplace. At that time, she was simply exploring the possibilities of exaggerated imagination and pre-visualized staging, and doing so by constructing rooms filled with bright color themes and fantastical scenes. And in the context of that moment in photography some four decades ago, her artworks were altogether and resoundingly original, and still are. To her credit, her playful images are easy to like; but in a backhanded twist, that very accessibility has also to some extent downplayed the conceptual rigor and sophistication that is embedded in her practice. She’s rightly known and respected as an innovator, but perhaps less so than she should be, especially by contemporary artists who are now standing on her artistic shoulders.
Janet Borden, Inc.
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