San Antonio
Sandy Skoglund, a multimedia artist whose work encompasses photography, sculpture, and installation, is perhaps best known for Radioactive Cats (1980), a photograph in which dozens of neon green cats infiltrate a drearily gray kitchen, its inhabitants somehow oblivious to the infestation. Anyone seeing the image for the first time might assume it’s the product of Photoshop, but it isn’t—what we see exists in real life and in three dimensions. In Skoglund’s current exhibition, “Enchanting Nature” (on view through February 1, 2026), this tableau joins two others, accompanied by additional sculptural and photographic works. Much of Skoglund’s practice is situated in the realm of constructive photography, but here the confining rectangle of the picture frame dissolves so that we can fully immerse ourselves in her fabricated worlds.
Skoglund’s exploration of photography began soon after she received an MFA in painting. Instead of using traditional darkroom techniques to achieve her aims, she constructed elaborate, stage-like settings in three dimensions, building environments that she then photographed. Though the final images, often swarming with scores of brightly painted monochrome animals, employ the same saturated color of commercial photography—hence the sense of unreality—painting and photography join hands with sculpture in Skoglund’s work; each element is crafted in variety of materials, from plaster and ceramic to popcorn, jelly beans, eggshells, and cheese doodles.
“Enchanting Nature” begins with an intimate atrium space showcasing some of Skoglund’s rarely seen photographic “outtakes,” plus a smattering of small sculptures and assemblages framed in shadowboxes or placed on pedestals (a pair of cast blue polyester resin dogs, for example). These works attest to the fact that each of the hundreds of creatures in her photographs exists in real life, and in three dimensions.
This introductory space opens into a spacious room filled with Fresh Hybrid (2008), which has previously been exhibited only as a photograph. Here, visitors can effectively enter and navigate around the environment, which is installed as an island within the gallery, making it accessible in 360 degrees as opposed to just frontally, like a theater stage. It’s a whimsical arrangement populated by felt-crafted humans and anthropomorphic trees that spring to life. Rather than leaves, their branches bloom with thousands of mass-produced chenille Easter chicks. The grassy landscape (and mural-size blue backdrop) is formed from thousands of fuzzy pipe cleaners. Technically a nature scene, nothing here is natural.
From Fresh Hybrid, viewers move on to Skoglund’s iconic Radioactive Cats. Here again, the gray kitchen (now devoid of the image’s human occupants) and its mischievous cats are arranged so we can walk through and appreciate the details. Handcrafted and imbued with individualized personalities, each plaster feline wreaks playful havoc, climbing over furnishings, tipping chairs, and breaking dishes.
The final environment, Revenge of the Goldfish (1981), which rhymes visually and thematically with Radioactive Cats, gives the sensation of being submerged in a dreamlike, underwater bedroom. More than 100 handcrafted ceramic goldfish (sized more like koi) hang from the ceiling at varying heights, clustering in schools to create the illusion that they’re swimming in an unseen ether. Like Skoglund’s cats, the fish possess distinctive personalities and expressions, and they are equally playful—invading drawers and pulling sheets and pillows off the bed. Skoglund’s original photographs populated the space with a mother and child, but here their presence is removed, and viewers effectively take their place.
The McNay boasts a formidably large exhibition space, but Skoglund’s work fills it snugly, and this show is an attractive crowd pleaser. Though visually enchanting, it treats the subject of nature with ambivalence. Radioactive Cats, for example, with its oblique reference to incidents like Chernobyl, hardly speaks kindly to the human imprint on the planet. But Skoglund refers to the creatures in her fabricated environments as “survivors,” and as such her works, though gently freighted with critique, seem ultimately optimistic about the fate of the natural world.
