Description:
Color photograph of an interior, fern-covered, beige room. Two women dressed in a beige wigs and housecoats take up positions sitting at a beige table and one by the beige painted window.
Label Text:
Curatorial Fellowship exhibition: What's So Funny: How Humor Makes Us Think, March 21 - April 28, 2019
Sandy Skoglund’s series of photography made between 1979-1984 presents playful repetition of colorful motifs within otherwise mundane domestic settings. An early work in the series, Ferns portrays three women set within a beige world brightened only by the ferns on the walls. Skoglund’s images are commonly interpreted as humorous in that their surrealist nature borders on the absurd, but contrary to this reaction, Skoglund seeks to provoke sensations of, in the artist’s words, “discomfort and self-reflection.” When the women are observed closely, there is a claustrophobia within the monochrome space that reflects Skoglund’s caution of domestic responsibility. Does your reaction to the painting change when you place yourself within the photograph? How would you feel if you were the women (or woman) trapped within in the scene? - Kayla Peterson (M.A. Art History, 2020) and Siyu Shen (M.A. Art History, 2020)
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=UM+1981.7 |
