Bio
Tracey Snelling
Bio
Through the use of sculpture, photography, video, and large scale installation,Tracey Snelling gives her impression of a place, its people and their experience. Often, the cinematic image stands in for real life as it plays out behind windows in the buildings, sometimes creating a sense of mystery, other times stressing the mundane. Her work derives from voyeurism, film noir, and geographical and architectural location. Within this idea of location, themes develop of a particular locale’s inhabitants: Who are these people?
What do they do and why do they do it? These questions transport observation into the realm of storytelling.
Tracey Snelling was born in Oakland, California in 1970. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Oakland, California. Snelling has shown her work extensively in solo and group exhibitions around the world.
She is a 2016 recipient of the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Snelling has recently completed her most extensive installation to date, One Thousand Shacks. Standing over 5 meters high and 3 meters wide, One Thousand Shacks is a wall of smallscale shacks, similar to the favelas in Brazil, with lights, video, and sound. The installation references the issue of extreme global poverty, and will be shown at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Michigan with ArtPrize.
Snelling has shown work in museums such as the Palazzo Reale, Milan; The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Belgium; Gemeentemuseum Helmond, the Netherlands; Shanghai Zendai MOMA, China; The Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Kunstmuseen Krefeld Germany; El Museo de Arte de Banco de la Republica, Bogota; The Stenersen Museet, Oslo, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, among other museums. She has had
solo exhibitions throughout the US as well as in China, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and London, and has been awarded residencies in Beijing at Galerie Urs Meile and in Shanghai at the Shanghai Zendai MOMA (now the Himalayas Museum). Her large-scale installation Woman on the Run was originally commissioned by Selfridges, London during
Frieze 2008, and has traveled to Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; 21c Museum, Louisville; Frist, Nashville; SECCA, WinstonSalem; and the Virginia MOCA, Virginia Beach.
In 2010, Snelling was invited to exhibit her installation Bordertown at the Sundance Film Festival. Her first short film "Nothing" premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival 2012, and showed at the Thessaloniki Film Festival in Greece, Circuito Off in Venice, Italy, the AC Institute in New York, Aeroplastics Contemporary in Brussels, and the Crocker Museum in Sacramento. Her newest film The Stranger, in collaboration with Idan
Levin, references cultural identity and has poems in Spanish, English, Arabic, and Hebrew. It screened at the Arquiteturas Film Festival Lisboa in Portugal, Apex Art in New York, and The Battery in San Francisco.
Her latest commissions include an installation for an exhibition at the Negev Museum in Israel and an upcoming commission at the Historical Museum of Frankfurt. Snelling was recently included in the Triennale Brugge 2015 and Expo 2050 at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels and the Pilazzo Reale in Milan. She has an upcoming solo exhibition at Krupic Kersting in Cologne and HilbertRaum in Berlin, a public art project in San Francisco, a print project with the Maeght Foundation, Paris, and a residency and solo exhibition with the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, based on the subject of public policy and poverty.
