Sandy Skoglund considers love in the atomic age

Like most of conceptual artist Sandy Skoglund’s photographs, Atomic Love (1992) is open to many interpretations. Does it refer to the conditions of love in the atomic age? Or might it concern the atomization of all matter? The photo, along with two others in SLAM’s collection, invites the viewer to question their place in society as well as society itself.

In this fabricated scene, two models—a man and woman—stand behind a table between two mannequins. The woman stares down the barrel of the camera while the man gently embraces her from behind. The mannequins that surround them are posed as if engaged in routine activities, unaware of the living beings beside them. The entire scene—highchair, ceiling fan, dining table, and overturned vase included—is a uniform gold color and covered in a seemingly random object that makes perfect sense in Skoglund’s oeuvre: thousands of raisins. The intriguing pointillist effect causes the figures to blend in with their environment and almost become inanimate. 

According to an essay by scholar Carol Squires, Skoglund described the use of food in her installations as “the inappropriate, uncanny flirtation with abnormal forms of behavior.” The artist’s room-sized environments exist first as installations and then live on as photographs taken from a specific perspective; after this photograph was taken, the installation was unexpectedly destroyed by a moth hatch bursting many of the raisins. Perhaps the image suggests alienation and absence of human interaction within a domestic setting.   

Skoglund’s interiors may be inhabited by both mannequins and real people and are often invaded by an overabundance of animals or foodstuffs. Whimsical yet confounding, they combine a Surrealist subversiveness with a Pop Art sense of playfulness and color. 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 during her undergraduate studies at the University of Iowa and continued to develop her personal style of concept art in New York. Today, Skoglund is an art professor at Rutgers University–Newark.