Dreams often bend the ordinary into the uncanny: cats glow, fish take flight, trees grow restless and run. In Sandy Skoglund’s installations, this surreal logic is given form. Her radioactive-green cats coil through a grey kitchen, goldfish swarm over a bedroom ceiling, and hybrid trees scatter across a mythical terrain.
“The first thing I remember is that they acquired a photograph in the 90s,” she said, recalling Gathering Paradise. “The first really big relationship development was with the installation Cocktail Party… The McNay Museum acquired this installation, which was a big break for me in terms of institutional support.”
Over the years, she’s appeared in group shows there, but Enchanting Nature is their most extensive collaboration yet, anchored by three installations: Radioactive Cats (1980), Revenge of the Goldfish (1981), and the debut of Fresh Hybrid (2008).
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Sandy Skoglund, Radioactive Cats, 1989. Painted ceramic cats, painted wood chair, painted wood table, painted metal chair with plastic seat, and two painted wood frames. Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; Purchased with the Madeleine H. Russell, class of 1937, fund and museum acquisition funds.
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Sandy Skoglund, Revenge of the Goldfish, 1981. Low fired clay fish with acrylic paint, bedroom furniture consisting of bed, bedclothes, bureau, bureau mirror, two bed lamps, two nightstands, and two table lamps all painted variegated blue. Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; Purchased with the Madeleine H. Russell, class of 1937, fund and museum acquisition funds.
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Sandy Skoglund, The Company of Others, 2021/1990. Pigmented ink print, 16 x 20 in. Courtesy of the artist.
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Sandy Skoglund, The Wild Inside, 2021/1989. Pigmented ink print, 16 x 20 in. Courtesy of the artist.
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Sandy Skoglund, Fresh Hybrid installation (detail), 2008. Courtesy of the artist.
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Sandy Skoglund, self portrait. Courtesy of the artist.
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Sandy Skoglund, The Conversation, 2021/1992. Pigmented ink print, 16 x 20 in. Courtesy of the artist.
“It was really the idea that I was going to make everything instead of going to find everything,” she explained. In Radioactive Cats, that impulse led to months of sculpting and painting cats in a color she deemed “the most unnatural,” a yellow-green mutation meant to evoke survival through change. The grey-painted tenement room mirrored the space she lived in at the time. “The title is really to talk about mutation,” she said. “The radioactivity of the cats to me is a kind of illustration of the success and survival of change.”
If Radioactive Cats deals with adaptation, Revenge of the Goldfish explores accumulation. Here, dozens of bright, elaborate fish overrun a domestic bedroom, evoking both horror films and the ornamental breeding of carp into goldfish.
“It’s a swarm of bright-colored, beautiful elements that are less valuable, important, or dangerous alone but in accumulation develop another form of power,” Skoglund reflected. “To me, the piece is really about beauty accumulating and achieving power.”
Like a nightmare filtered through a childhood aquarium, it probes our fascination with spectacle, horror, and mutation, what she calls “that very primal experience quite similar to that of the Neanderthal in the wild.”
Alongside these installations, The Outtakes, large-scale photographic enlargements drawn from images Skoglund once discarded, offers a rare look at her process. During COVID, she had time to sort through boxes of large negatives.
“I was overcome with some of them,” she recalled. “They spoke to me. They were so different, so interesting. I finally felt as though they had to be printed and seen.” These photographs expose the seams she once cropped out: models glancing at the camera, a stray plumbing pipe, a moment of hesitation. “The hygiene I imposed on the early pictures became restrictive, and I decided to let all these things in.”
Throughout Enchanting Nature, animals and vegetation are partial mirrors of ourselves. Skoglund resists tidy interpretations like “interspecies kinship,” yet acknowledges how viewers may see innocence, altruism, or independence reflected in her handmade creatures.
If the installations feel enchanted, Skoglund insists they are rooted in reality. “I like to use the word enchantment because it is a form of self-mesmerization,” she said. “Basically, you wake up in the morning, and BOOM, reality, so for me, all art is about reality. Enchanting Nature is about facing reality, not spinning fantasy.”
Her cats, fish, and hybrids may appear fantastical, but every detail is real, crafted by hand, and painstakingly arranged, a chosen struggle culminating in something that seems impossible to stage.
Like dreams, Skoglund’s installations collapse boundaries between the familiar and the strange. Cats, fish, and chicks, icons of domesticity and kitsch, mutate into emissaries of survival, beauty, and power. Her hybrid trees and radioactive animals are not escape hatches from reality but invitations to see it afresh, to recognize the enchantment already embedded in the everyday.
In Enchanting Nature, the artist does not teach or preach; she stages a space where spectators drift, like dreamers, into scenes of mutation and kinship, horror and play. When we step back out of the McNay’s galleries, we carry with us that heightened sense of perception, a reminder that our waking life, too, is shaped by intention, imagination, and the strange persistence of wonder.
—MICHAEL McFADDEN
