On June 14 Kerry Skarbakka plans to jump off the roof of the Museum of Contemporary Art. He’s not trying to kill himself–in the name of art the Brooklyn-based photographer has also thrown himself down stairs, leaped off cliffs, porches, and overpasses, and flipped backward off the rungs of a ladder. His life-size color photos of these stunts–sometimes he’s supported by climbing gear he later digitally erases, sometimes not–have landed him on the covers of Aperture and Foto +. In October 2004, ArtReview picked him as one of ten outstanding young photographers from around the world who “look certain to shape the medium in years to come.”
A defining moment in the family’s history occurred when Brett, at 14, went to a church service with a friend and came home claiming that the preacher had miraculously made one of his legs grow, correcting a limp the family had supposedly overlooked. Taken by Brett’s story, the family quickly embraced Christian fundamentalism. They moved to a remote farm community in Tennessee, where Skarbakka’s stepfather’s computer skills were irrelevant and the family lived off the land in poverty.
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Fear and anxiety pervaded his childhood. So did violence and death. The family raised farm animals they slaughtered and ate. “Our clotheslines were strung up with flopping carcasses of beheaded, skinned animals,” he says. One day Skarbakka’s parents sent him to deal with a deformed rabbit whose teeth protruded so far it couldn’t eat. “We had shotguns,” he says. “I was given a hammer.”
Skarbakka’s stepfather was a six-foot-four, 280-pound Vietnam vet with shrapnel wounds and a Purple Heart. He was militant about discipline and control. In his view women were to be subservient and a fitting punishment for children who misbehaved or even so much as complained was manual labor–ridding the garden of every rock, for example. He kept many different translations of the Bible around, says Skarbakka, and he read them all. “He was very authoritative and made others crumble under his knowledge and his interpretation.”
With exposure to influences beyond his small Christian community, Skarbakka cultivated a rebellious look, wearing makeup, dyeing his hair orange, getting a number of piercings, and wearing “the biggest, gaudiest jewelry I could find,” scrubbing himself clean in the school bathroom at the end of each day. He started smoking pot at 15 and sought out fellow students he says he “could be more candid and less godly around.”
After that, Skarbakka attended the University of Washington, where he majored in studio arts with an emphasis on sculpture. His brother eventually joined him in Seattle, and the two became close, spending a good deal of time together outdoors, hiking, rock climbing, and mountain biking. During these trips, Skarbakka says, “We would be depressed together, talk about collaborating on art projects, and figure out why we were so fucked-up.”
“Our choices are never really our own,” he says, “except in the final moment: whether to jump or go down with the ship.”
