Sandy Skoglund: Outtakes

September 02 - October 15,2022

From RULE Gallery: "RULE Gallery is pleased to present Outtakes, an exhibition of photographs and sculptures by Sandy Skoglund at our Marfa location. The show will be on view from September 2 to October 15. Gallery hours are Wednesday – Saturday, 11 am-5 pm. As part of Chinati Weekend 2022, the gallery will host an exhibition reception with the artist in attendance on Friday, October 7, from 6 to 8 pm. Additionally, Sandy Skoglund will give an artist’s talk and walkthrough of the exhibition on Saturday, October 8, starting at 1:30 pm. All events are free and open to the public. Sandy Skoglund is an American photographer and installation artist best known for her fantastical and brightly colored tableaux from the 80s, 90s, and early 2000’s. Meticulously crafted as elaborate sets, Skoglund’s surrealistic scenes—comprised of various props, sculptural elements, and human models—are subsequently photographed, one composition among many chosen to represent the work. But what of the other images, the fate of those deemed mistakes or inconsistent with the artist’s initial vision? In a nod to the deep cuts and the varieties of artistic experience, Outtakes presents a selection of unseen works of some of Skoglund’s most iconic and innovative installations. In the wake of a global pandemic and with time stretching out in a vast open sea of uncertainty, Skoglund began cleaning her studio and going through all the boxes of negatives from her decades of installation photo shoots. In the artist’s words, “A sense of curiosity took over. The blanket of extra time allowed me to linger, sifting through all those transparencies. I felt the events of each photoshoot come flooding back, along with the choices made”. For the relentlessly iterative Skoglund, the kinship to and divergence from the originally chosen pieces spoke of the vagaries of the artistic process and, more generally, how most of us move through life between ambiguity and clarity, searching for answers in the minefield of doubt. For the artist, the smallest and largest differences in the rejected photos became new signposts, as she realized “in a jarring way, it felt as if what was wrong might now be right.” The photographs in Outtakes can be viewed as an embodiment of the repetition and abundance that have always coursed through Skoglund’s work. Like the thousands of arranged popped kernels of corn in Warm Frost (2001), each one exploding with its own particular expression, the images on display revel in the same visual bounty as the archetypes while also suggesting an alternative to the notion of the ideal composition. Latent potential comes to light when we look upon things we have long known and remark in them what we have never seen before. A more personal window into Skoglund’s work, Outtakes is an ode to the revelations inherent in reappraising, in her words, “the things you leave behind when you have to make choices.” Sandy Skoglund (b. 1946, Weymouth, MA) received a BA in 1968 from Smith College in Northampton, MA, and her MFA from the University of Iowa in 1972. After college, Skoglund moved to New York City and, over the course of the last half-century, has become one of the most recognized and celebrated installation artists and photographers in contemporary art today. Her work has been exhibited extensively worldwide, including institutions in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver, Miami, San Francisco, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Scottsdale, San Antonio, St. Louis, Boston, London, Paris, Milan, Venice, Geneva, Zurich, Barcelona, Tokyo, Shanghai, Moscow, Berlin, Munich, Stockholm, and Seoul among many others. Today her work is collected by numerous prominent institutions, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Chicago Art Institute; Dallas Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, CA; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Princeton University Museum of Art, Princeton, NJ; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and Yale University Gallery, New Haven, CT, among others. Skoglund currently teaches at Rutgers University."

Reception: October 07, 2022 | 6-8 pm

RULE Gallery (Marfa) 204 E. San Antonio St
Marfa, Texas 79843
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