Never ready for death. The substance and subject is also the surface of Skoglund's cow-encrusted world. In fact, the only materials besides hamburger used in the dioramic photograph of a lobe woman sitting on a stool are her blond wig and turquoise shift dress. Essentially, the woman and the surface as well as the implied interior of her environment are materially one. Spirituality in the Flesh implies that in this very material, so basically worldly and animal, so quick to decay and remind us of the short life of the body, rests its spiritual value.
Death is arrested as the enemy approaches - and it is a photograph.
A photograph cannot ordinarily capture the ever-changing, but the quality of mortality is intrinsic to the elements of this photograph. The 1982 Patients and Nurses 's bilateral symmetry, containing three pairs of doubles, makes it almost cinematic. Two nurses in the extreme foreground turn toward two figures seated on the identical chairs between a luminous standing lamp at dead center. Patients and Nurses has a kind of gallows humor provided you are sitting in the red shoes of the patient. Red is also the color of their clothing and skin as well as areas of the room.