Sandy Skogland was the artist who first caused me to think about the artwork making process as meditative. She is a conceptual artist who deals with repetitive, process-oriented art production. In the Spring of 2002 her installations and photographs were on exhibit at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York. I had the opportunity to ask Sandy if she found the obsessively repetitive process of creating her work to be a meditative one. She said that she hadn’t really thought about it that way but certainly did.

Her room-sized “Breathing Glass” installation was a perfect example of her repetitive process, affixing thousands of multiple small objects on a shape. This installation was comprised of thousands of individually lamp-worked glass dragonflies on wires protruding through an ethereal blue wall, interconnected by a wire grid mechanized to randomly vibrate. Miniature upside-down plastic figures floated on wires above a low, elevated platform in front of the wall. A bench was placed facing her installation where one sat and waited with suspenseful anticipation for the vibrations to start. Patience paid off as the sound of delicately tinkling glass was heard as the butterflies fluttered amidst miniature marshmallows. On an adjacent wall hung one of her signature Cibachrome photograph of the installation.

Sandy is known for creating room-sized installations she uses to stage her photographs with real people placed in them. Her “Breathing Glass” photograph shows the glass dragonflies in a weightless room of blue. The floor and ceiling are not what we usually experience. Are the humans dressed in blue standing on the ceiling? Are the mirror covered mannequins standing on their heads?

As well as relating to the repetitive process used to cover the forms in her work, I was able to visually relate to this inverted space. When I was a child I used to lie on the floor, look up and pretend the ceiling was the floor. I imagined what it was like to step over the tops of doorways and duck under the tables, lamps, sofa and piano. Looking at Sandy’s photograph evokes those old feelings of warping reality while moving around upside-down figures. This is the link to see the photo in more detail:
http://www.sandyskoglund.com/pages/recent/glass/bgphoto.html.

The wall of shimmering glass dragonflies now hangs at the University of Miami’s Lowe Art Museum. Thanks to an anonymous donor the artwork is on permanent view for visitors. For those of us who can’t get there and are interested in her work there are great photos on her website: http://www.sandyskoglund.com/.

All images are copyrighted by Sandy Skoglund.