Tracey Snelling

Tracey Snelling (born 1970) 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.

Early life and education Snelling was born in Oakland, California. She learned about alternative processes and contemporary artists while attending photography classes in Northern California, and began to experiment with photography. She took several years off to do conservation work with the California Conservation Corps and 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. and later 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 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 16-foot by 10 foot wall of small-scale shacks, photographs, wire, wood, and other materials were used in each shack 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 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.

Her work is included in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

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