“American ideologies of pleasure and beauty are embedded in our common objects, as they are in any culture. My attraction to these objects is kind of like that of being a stranger to myself, looking at the iconography or pleasure and how we are supposed to experience it in our culture.”
-Sandy Skoglund

Sitting at the intersection between sculpture, installation art, and photography Sandy Skoglund’s artwork turns everyday scenes of domesticity and suburban life into surreal, dreamlike environments that she has likened to a “theme park”. In the digital era, her photographs also exist as an anomaly, created not out of Photoshop, but rather from hand-crafted installations which include her sculptures, and sourced objects, with friends and family members often sitting in as subjects. The resulting photographs, of which lots 34-37 are prime examples, become the surviving documents of these rather playful and peculiar scenes.

In the present lot, one of Skoglund’s most well-known images, Revenge of the Goldfish, the sculptures of goldfish have quite literally transformed the boys’ room into a fishbowl, with the vivid blue interior referencing not just water, but also the most commonly used color for aquarium gravel. Lots 35 and 36 also feature her sculptures, with red foxes darting in and out of a restaurant’s dining room and green cats taking over a utilitarian kitchen, respectively. Further, lot 37, Atomic Love, the only lot being offered without a sculptural element, instead shows how Skoglund elevates the common object, in this case, raisins, to create a mesmerizing pattern.