When Sandy Skoglund’s Revenge of the Goldfish first appeared in 1981, it announced a way of working that felt both meticulously planned and radically untethered. The photograph, part of the “Modern Women | Modern Vision: Photographs from the Bank of America Collection” exhibit at the Hudson River Museum through May 10, depicts a domestic bedroom painted entirely in blue-green hues, invaded by hundreds of bright orange fish—on the floor, floating through the air, clinging improbably to walls and furniture. Two figures are in bed beneath the spectacle, seemingly resigned to the surreal abundance around them. The image is playful, uncanny, and unforgettable, and it has become one of the most recognizable works in late 20th-century staged photography.
For Sandy Skoglund, however, the work was never about executing a preconceived image. It emerged instead from a long, physical, and often uncertain process—one that she describes as an effort to escape the strictures of rational thought altogether. “Thinking is the beginning of suffering and pain,” Skoglund says. “It separates you from the world.” For her, art-making is not about analysis or critique but about finding a way out of self-consciousness and into another state of awareness. What that state offers, she says simply, is freedom.
Skoglund came of age artistically in the 1970s, steeped in the language of conceptual art rather than traditional photography. Trained as a painter, she was influenced by figures such as John Baldessari, William Wegman, Vito Acconci, and Claes Oldenburg—artists who treated the camera less as a tool for documenting the world and more as a witness to events, performances, or constructed situations. Rather than going out into the world to find subject matter, Skoglund kept the camera fixed and focused on what could be placed in front of it.
This approach would become central to her practice. Her photographs are documents of environments that once existed in real space—fully built, painted, and populated by hand. In the case of Revenge of the Goldfish, that meant sculpting hundreds of individual fish, each one different, over the course of months.
Importantly, Skoglund did not begin with the idea of fish filling a room. “I do not see a picture in the beginning,” she says. “The visual outcome is an outcome—it’s not something I see in advance. It makes itself through the process.” To commit to a fixed concept, she argues, would be deadening. The work depends instead on allowing form, repetition, and material struggle to guide the way forward.
At the time, repetition was a dominant strategy in minimal and post-minimal art. Skoglund paid close attention to artists such as Agnes Martin, whose oeuvre revolves around the persistence of line. But where minimalism emphasized restraint and reduction, Skoglund sought to animate repetition through craft and touch. After completing Radioactive Cats (1980), a staged photograph of a stark, gray kitchen overrun by glowing green cats, she deliberately chose a smaller, simpler form—fish—as a way to continue working through repetition without abstraction.
To do so, she enrolled in a hand-building ceramics class in New York, entering a craft-based environment far removed from the critical art discourse of the moment. The work was slow, physically demanding, and humbling. Each fish required attention, resistance, and adjustment. Over time, as her skill increased, the struggle eased, and her mind grew freer. Only later did the more analytical questions arise: where the fish would go, what color the room would be, who would appear in the photograph.
That sequence matters. For Skoglund, vision does not precede process—it results from it. “The vision appeared as a result of the process,” she says. “It did not appear before the process.”
This philosophy places her squarely in the lineage of the surrealists, though not in their iconography so much as in their methods. Early 20th-century surrealists turned to dreams, psychology, and techniques like automatic writing to access realities that rational thought could not reach. Skoglund sees her work as a continuation of that proposition: that reality is not limited to scientific fact or conscious experience. Dreams, unconscious states, and physical immersion are equally valid ways of knowing.
Her photographs, often described as surreal, are also deeply material. In an era increasingly defined by digital manipulation and AI-generated imagery, Skoglund is clear-eyed about what distinguishes her work. While software can simulate fantastical scenes, it cannot replicate the chosen struggle embedded in the making—the accumulated decisions and imperfections that give the image its meaning.
Ultimately, Skoglund resists grand interpretations of her work, even as it continues to invite them. “So, in all of the work, regardless of whether it’s Revenge of the Goldfish or more recent work,” she says, “the result is always just trying to entertain myself.”
That entertainment is often humorous but it’s not frivolous. It is rigorous, demanding, and deeply felt. And more than four decades on, Revenge of the Goldfish continues to reward viewers willing to enter its logic, and perhaps to stop thinking themselves for a moment.
“Modern Women | Modern Vision: Photographs from the Bank of America Collection” is on exhibit at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers through May 10.
This article appears in March 2026.
