Kerry Skarbakka (b. 1970, Duluth, Minnesota) is an American artist working across photography, performance, moving image, sculpture, and installation. His work examines vulnerability, identity, masculinity, and the forces that shape human experience. Working from lived experience and embodied participation, Skarbakka uses performance to place his own body within the conditions he investigates, where physical action becomes a means of constructing both image and meaning.
Skarbakka first gained recognition for The Struggle to Right Oneself, an extended series of photographs in which his body appears suspended in moments of physical uncertainty. The work grew from questions of mortality, instability, and what happens after control has been surrendered. His later work considers how the forces acting upon us shape our understanding of ourselves, our relationships to others, and the world we inhabit.
Underlying these projects is a persistent question about how much control we actually have over the circumstances that shape us. The work considers what happens when outcomes remain uncertain, how identity and masculinity are formed through culture and history, and how the body is changed through its encounters with physical forces, objects, and environments. The body is vulnerable to these conditions while also capable of acting within them, carrying the consequences of those encounters forward.
Skarbakka’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Haifa Museum of Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Torrance Art Museum, the George Eastman Museum, the Andy Warhol Museum, and the Aperture Foundation. He has received support from Creative Capital, the Oregon Arts Commission, the Ford Family Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, and the City of Seattle’s 1% for Art program. Skarbakka is Associate Professor of Photography at Oregon State University, where he heads the Photography and Digital Studio area. He lives and works in Oregon.
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