Sandy Skoglund: Outtakes

RULE Gallery is pleased to present Outtakes, an exhibition of photographs and sculptures by Sandy Skoglund at our Marfa location, following a celebrated run at our Denver gallery.

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’s itinerant curiosity turned to what the artist called “countless boxes in the classic yellow of the Kodak company” of archived negatives—the outtakes. Decades removed from their inception, the images slowly revealed their secrets. For the relentlessly iterative Skoglund, the kinship to and divergence from the originals 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. Some of the narrative translations of the outtakes are drastically altered via choreographic whims, while other discrepancies—a blur here, a frame shift there—read like endearing fractures in space and time that take a scrutinizing eye to discern.