A dream or a nightmare? Revenge of the Goldfish explores our relationship with nature

This photograph, in the recognizable style of conceptual artist Sandy Skoglund, features more than 80 fluttering, bright-orange goldfish. The uncanny scene is representative of the artist’s proclivity for overpopulating domestic spaces with animals, like in her photograph Radioactive Cats, which was recently featured on 1 Fine Arts Blog. 

A troubling of goldfish varying in size swim through the air of a blue bedroom inhabited by two people. One, a young boy, sits up in bed. The other, his mother, lays on her side, seemingly fast asleep. The blue-green paint on the walls bleeds onto the windows, furniture, and floor, harshly contrasting with the color of the fish that overtake the space and alluding to the inside of an aquarium. The sleeping woman evokes a dreamlike mood, in direct opposition to the borderline-threatening title. The many goldfish sculptures do not overlap or obscure one another, further producing a hyperreal quality. Artforum described the work as “a fantasy about mundane and unobtrusive details of daily life that suddenly get out of control—a fantasy that transforms obsession into humor.”

The photograph is a continued exploration of the interconnectedness of the human world and the animal world. Scholar Carol Squires described the ambiguous theme as “culture versus nature” in Sandy Skoglund: Reality Under Siege: A Retrospective. Many of the artist’s photographs critique both Americans’ ideologies of pleasure and beauty and humans’ manipulation of nature.  

Skoglund hand sculpted each fish out of terracotta, then placed them around a stage set: hanging from the ceiling, lying in and on furniture, and resting under the bed. One fish sits in the boy’s hands, while another rests on the sleeping person’s face and neck. The models included Skoglund’s colleague at the Hartford Art School. The work features the same set as Skoglund’s 1981 photograph Early Morning, which was inspired by the artist’s memory of waking her parents up to play.  

The artist began photographing large-scale installations in the late 1970s, a time when ideas about art making were undergoing “a radical change,” with artists reshaping the narrow definition of “high art,” according to Squires. As a result of these changes, conceptual art grew in popularity. Conceptual art, or conceptualism, is a form of art in which the concept or idea involved in the work is of more importance than the aesthetic of the finished project. Skoglund first encountered it at during her undergraduate studies at the University of Iowa and continued to develop her personal style of concept art in New York. Today, Skoglund lives and works in Newark, New Jersey. 

Because of light sensitivity, works on paper, including Revenge of the Goldfish, are displayed for limited times only. However, this and other prints, drawings, and photographs can be viewed by request in the Museum’s Print Study Room.