Tracey Snelling

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. She attended a community college, and then took several years off to do conservation work with the California Conservation Corps. She later attended the University of New Mexico, where she earned a BFA, working as a firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service to finance her education.

Career

After her graduation, Snelling worked primarily as a photographer and collage artist. She continued to experiment with photography, painting over images of everyday 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 each of the rooms. In one a Victorian woman painted on 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.

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, synced so that 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. 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."

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. Snelling worked with Levin again in 2015 on The Stranger, 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.

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."

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." 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.

Snelling has exhibited in international galleries, museums and institutions, including the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Palazzo Reale, Milan; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Kunstmuseem 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.

Snelling lives and works in Oakland, California and Berlin, Germany.