Get inside Sandy Skoglund’s room of raw bacon
The first thing you notice is the bright blue chair, which somewhat resembles Vincent van Gogh‘s own Van Gogh’s Chair painting. In the centre of a room, it’s shot by Sandy Skoglund amongst a fleshy background. Your eyes adjust a bit more, and you’ll realise it’s not dodgy-toned wallpaper, and it’s not just the background, either. Everything, including the chair, is delicately wrapped in bacon. Body Limits employs no Photoshop, and every strip of bacon, including those weaving down the legs of the chair, was placed intentionally by Skoglund.
Using recurring images of food is a fairly commonplace motif in art in general, and particularly in Skoglund’s work. Drawing from the mass production pioneered by Andy Warhol and his many soup cans and Cola bottles, Skoglund creates a more elaborate, lived-in scene while maintaining the surreal effect she became known for. It could be anything from cats, Cheetos or leaves, but in Skoglund’s hands, it’s guaranteed they’ll be visually amplified to bizarre heights.
As an example of painstaking scenography and an unlimited bacon budget, Body Limits, as with most of Skoglund’s work, can be interpreted as a comment on consumerism at large, although Skoglund disagrees. “I’ve always seen the food that I use as a way to communicate directly with the viewer through the stomach and not through the brain,” she told Artsy. Food as a subject is often reduced to associations with capitalism and greed, but Skoglund is toying more with familiarity and context.
“If the viewer can recognise what they’re looking at without me telling them what it is, that’s really important to me,” she said. “And I think it’s, for me, just a way for the viewer to enter into. It’s something they’ve experienced, and it’s a way for them to enter into the word: ‘Oh yeah, I’ve seen that stuff before. I know what that is.’ But it’s used inappropriately, it’s used not only inappropriately, it’s also used very excessively in the imagery as well.”
The excessive element meant similar creations to Body Limits’ bacon room could take Skoglund months at a time, all in the hopes of creating a set that felt real and impossible at the same time. She constantly manipulates volume but never scale. The chairs and people that frequent her work are normal-sized, just so repetitively used that they seem a larger visual force than they are.
What she wants people to notice most of all is the set and the sculptures. “All of the work that’s going on is the chaos, and then the people inside are just there, the same way we are in our lives,” she says. “So this kind of coping with the chaos of reality is more important in the old work. This kind of disappearing into it.”
Her work promises surrealistic escape weirdly rooted in reality. If you were ever to plaster a room with bacon, you’d find it looks just like what Skoglund’s did. But she’s likely the only patient to do it, then move on to another room to be filled and covered with something else.
