Tracey Snelling
Tracey Snelling | |
|---|---|
| File:Tracey Snelling Self Portrait.jpg | |
| Born | Tracey Snelling 1970 Oakland, California |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of New Mexico |
| Style | Contemporary |
| Children | 2 |
| Awards | 2015 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant |
Tracey Snelling is an American contemporary artist. Working with sculpture, video, photography and installation, and deriving from sociology, voyeurism and geographical and architectural location, her work gives her impression of a place, its people, and their experience. [1][2]
Early life and education
Snelling was born in Oakland, California. She learned about alternative processes and contemporary artists while attending a photography class in Northern California, and began to experiment with photography as contemporary art. She attended a community college and took several years off to do conservation work with the California Conservation Corps and work as a firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service. She completed her education at the University of New Mexico, where she earned a BFA.[3][4]
Career
After her graduation, Snelling worked primarily as a photographer and collage artist. She continued to experiment with photography, painting over images of every day day life and tearing negatives to create surreal images. Her first sculptural piece was 1881 Chestnut Street, an elaborate 2-D model of a New York brownstone created from snippets of 1940s-era Life magazines. It was constructed without a facade to allow viewers to look inside of each of the rooms. In one a Victorian woman painted an an easel; another showed people walking in overcoats; a train ran through an upstairs room. Described by the East Bay Express as "a world unto itself", it inspired Snelling to build more intricate pieces.[5]
In 2005, she created El Mirador, a large sculpture of an adobe hotel with six windows. A DVD player behind the piece showed a montage of film clips and the characters appeared to be interacting with one another. The original El Mirador was twenty inches tall; Snelling later made a six-and-a-half foot tall version of the piece ("Big El Mirador") to show at Sundance and the Oakland Underground Film Festival. [5][6] In a review of El Mirador as it was exhibited during Art Basel in 2006, the Miami New Times wrote: "Snelling's voyeuristic work exudes a surreal vibe dripping with poignant haplessness. It plays with the viewer's desire to engage in the emotional mix of the strangers they are intruding upon, as if challenging one not to find seduction in people or things that are broken."[2]
Snelling originally used found footage for her video work. In 2008, she created a short film, Woman on the Run, shooting original footage. She and her friends appeared as characters who would change roles as Woman on the Run traveled to different venues. With her co-producer, Idan Levin, Snelling subsequently added to the installation by collaborating on a "site-conforming msytery" called Woman on the Run Redux, which involved an iPhone application, among other elements.[4] Snelling worked with Levin again in 2015 on The Stranger, is a 4:42 minute film which explored belonging and identity. The film included two narrated poems, one in English and Spanish and the other in Hebrew and Arabic, with concurrent subtitles below. [7]
Snelling's 2013 work included Mystery Hour. It used large-scale posters and elaborate architectural models to create "archetypal worlds from middle- and lowbrow genre films" to "depict imaginary B movies whose premises are as facetious as they are seductively lurid." ArtForum described Mystery Hour as "mesmerizing, sinister." [8]
Her multi-media sculptural installation One Thousand Shacks (2016) conveyed the "precarious individual existence" of people living in extreme poverty. Composed of a 15-by-10 wall of small-scale shacks, photographs, wire, wood, and other materials were used in each shack to to capture people "living the best they can in excruciating circumstances," portraying her subjects "not as powerless victims, but rather as defiant and hopeful members of humanity."[9] A variation of One Thousand Shacks titled Tenement Rising was included in Snelling's Naked City solo show the gallery Krupic Kersting in Cologne, Germany in late 2016.[10]
Snelling has exhibited in international galleries, museums and institutions, including the The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels; Palazzo Reale, Milan; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany; El Museo de Arte de Banco de la Republica, Bogota; and the Stenersen Museet, Oslo. Her short films have screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Circuito Off in Venice, Italy, and the Arquiteturas Film Festival Lisboa in Portugal, among other places.[10]
Snelling lives and works in Oakland, California and Berlin, Germany.[9]
References
- ^ Farr, Kristin (January 16, 2016). "Tracey Snelling, New Image Art, West Hollywood". Juxtapoz. Retrieved 26 March 2017.
- ^ a b De Jesus, Carlos Suarez (December 28, 2006). "All Politics Is Loco". Miami New Times. Retrieved 31 March 2017.
- ^ Tandy, Katie (November 19, 2015). "Voyeuristic Artist Tracey Snelling Reminds Us To Look Closer". The Establishment. Retrieved 26 March 2017.
- ^ a b Leyva-Pérez, Irina (February 1, 2013). "Tracey Snelling: An Urban Narrative". ArtPulse. Retrieved 31 March 2017.
- ^ a b Swan, Rachel (July 21, 2010). "Tracey Snelling's Bordertown Romance". East Bay Express. Retrieved 31 March 2017.
- ^ "Spark: Tracey Snelling". KQED. August 4, 2006. Retrieved 31 March 2017.
- ^ UICA. "ArtPrize artist investigates world's poor, social issues, strength". cultured.gr. Cultured. Retrieved 31 March 2017.
- ^ Westin, Monica (December 19, 2013). "Picks: San Francisco Tracey Snelling". ArtForum. Retrieved 31 March 2017.
- ^ a b Bean, Kyrsin (August 1, 2016). "Tracy Snelling's Art Contemplates the Precariousness of Suffering". Oakland Magazine. Retrieved 31 March 2017.
- ^ a b Enrico, V. (September 19, 2016). "Tracey Snelling: The Naked City / Krupic Kersting Gallery, Cologne". Vernissage TV. Retrieved 31 March 2017.