Exploring the Urban Soul Through the Sculptural Vision of Tracey Snelling
- Brainz Magazine
- Oct 2
- 6 min read
Michael Klein is best known for his work and achievements in the field of contemporary art. As both a dealer and curator, he has had a long and distinguished career as a New York gallery owner and director, representing an international roster of emerging and mid-career artists. He became the first in-house curator for Microsoft Corp.
Discovering new artists can be both thrilling and illuminating. It was my preoccupation as a young dealer in New York, always on the lookout for new talent or established artists who needed support. The same held when I became the in-house curator for Microsoft Corp. The focus of the collection, begun in 1987, was on emerging and mid-career artists.
Such is the case with Tracey Snelling, whose work I first saw in 2000 at the San Francisco art fair. I was immediately impressed with her work and acquired it for the Microsoft collection, as did a friend who was traveling with me. Later, I visited her studio in Oakland, CA, and have continued to follow her career. In fact, in 2003, at the invitation of the artist Hills Snyder, I organized a solo show of her work for an alternative space he managed in San Antonio, Texas, Sala Diaz.
The exhibition, Sculpture and Photographs, was reviewed in Glasstire, a local magazine.
“The opening recently at Sala was artist Tracey Snelling, from California. Tracey makes sculptures of buildings and environments taken from life that force you to see what you might have missed in passing, porn on a television inside the house you passed on your walk around the neighborhood, the women in another window watching a cat fight, things like this, things that sit just under the surface in daily life.”
Now, 25 years later, I am still watching her and admiring her efforts as she develops her ideas. Her theme focuses on different cultures and different locations, yet all share the character of urban life. She is curious about how it is shaped by the architecture it uses and the people who occupy it. Her perspective as a woman is challenged by observing the life around her, first in the US, her home base, and then in Italy. She now spends more time working and living in Berlin, Germany.
Over the last two decades, she has assembled a very long list of solo and group exhibitions in museums, galleries, and cultural programs in both Europe and the US, with forthcoming shows in Toronto and Munich. Yet, though she has a remarkable international career and is busy all the time, she is still relatively unknown to the vast majority of collectors, curators, and critics. Because her sculpture is an amalgam of technologies, from electric lighting and neon to photography and video, all telling her stories and creating her installations, as a result, which department does she belong to? Such work has recently been categorized as New Media.
Like a documentary filmmaker, she is building her sculpture, some might say sets, crossing the research she has done on the location and building. How people live, exist, and function in these idiosyncratic structures and locations.
She may choose a building to survey, a neighborhood, or a location as if preparing for a film, but her result is a multi-dimensional sculpture of great complexity. One Thousand Shacks, a monumental work conceived and made in 2016, is a case in point. Her website description explores both the subject and process at length, the structure stands some 15 feet tall and 9 feet wide, bringing her usual cavalcade of images, textures, and colors, along with critical observations, all orchestrated to create this grand three-dimensional collage of urban habitation. One may ask, do people really live like this? And the answer is yes. While no particular location is identified, it is an amalgam of urban structures seen from São Paulo, Brazil, to Hong Kong, China. For this work, it is the facade behind the structure itself where all the technical parts, wires, lights, and the scaffolding that is the backbone of the structure, exist. As she explains further, "The wall is bustling and alive. My installation demonstrates the perilous situation that the world’s poor face, the social problems, as well as the strength that is demonstrated in the struggle to survive."
What I find so interesting about her work is how she adapts a multimedia approach to test the theme that remains architecture. Buildings have character, they can have charm or look unapproachable. They can be modest or grand, simple or complex. She uses all types to create narratives that report how people live, love, and exist in these varied examples of urban dwellings. I would suggest that she choose architecture with a certain and unique character and abstract forms in many ways that, in their construction, suggest use, function, and purpose. Like other sculptors of this period, from Siah Armajani and Vito Acconci to Jackie Ferrara and Mary Miss, architecture is a model of forms for sculptural ideas. Architecture, for these artists, is a paradigm.
Each setting she creates, whether freestanding or table-top, has within it a narrative, a statement about and her observations of the life lived by the dwellers of these places, whether in the West or the East. Mexicali China in 2011 is tabletop in size and a demonstration of the confluence of immigrant populations that creates divergent communities. Or 7 Eleven in 2015, a store familiar to many Americans, ubiquitous in neighborhoods everywhere because of the self-serve commercial operation and logo.
Snelling also works on a life-size scale, Wang’s House is one such example. It incorporates a video projection within the setting of a rough-looking building and a ten-foot-tall telephone pole. It is a fictional building based on different houses in the Caochangdi village in Beijing, China. Built of necessity rather than design, fitting the needs of the user, not a potential buyer, this unique village became an art center in northeast Beijing, but “began facing demolition in July 2018 due to illegal construction and land-use issues.” The dramatic installation was built and shown in a solo show in 2009. Snelling lists her materials as wood, paint, newspaper, posters, electroluminescent wire, lights, garbage, furniture, TV, wires, food, and a projector. She stages the structure like a movie set, yet it is a sculptural installation, a recreation of what she has observed during her time in China. It is a social document crossing the public reality of poverty with the modern technology of 21st-century life. Here is a kind of nod to Ed Kienholz’s sculptural tableau Back Seat Dodge ’38 from 1964, itself a hybrid of Pop art with social reality. With her ongoing program of such projects, she has become part of a long tradition of similar artists creating tableaux based on real life or imagined experiences, Paul Thek, Mac Adams, and the Belgian Marcel Broodthaers. Along with Donna Dennis, whose interest also resides in architecture, but her focus is on the infrastructure of the New York City subway stations and tunnels. All of these artists are in a special category of sculpture, each considering a narrative and building an installation to create a unique place or space, a platform for the imagination.
More recently, her attention has been drawn to existing buildings that she discovers on her travels throughout Europe. Two such examples are Vele di Scampia, 2024, in Naples, and Bierpinsel, 2023, in Berlin. Each is both an interpretation of the building design and a study of its use. Odd in shape and form, they represent unique architectural styles, confounding the viewer as to their real purpose or practical function. The stepped or layered arrangement of stories of Vele di Scampia, like the decks of an ocean liner, suggests luxury, but these apartments are for low-income families. Bierpinsel is a very oddly shaped construction. According to a recent architectural magazine article, “Bierpinsel is a 46-meter building in Berlin, resembling an observation tower, with a restaurant and nightclub, built between 1972-1976. It is now closed and in need of reconstruction.” Both are perfect examples for Snelling to explore and review their unique sculptural shape, but also the socio-economic realities of their present-day status. Her subtext might be the failure of the ambition of Modernist architecture.
Snelling’s vision and fascination with the life of buildings have no borders. She has and will continue to explore the interaction of people and their dwellings, developing what will be an extraordinary body of work mirroring life in the mid-21st century.
Read more from Michael Klein
Michael Klein, Owner & Director at Michael Klein Arts, LLC
Michael Klein's expertise lies in his role as a private art dealer and freelance, independent curator for individuals, institutions, and arts organizations. Today, Michael Klein Arts works with a diverse group of artists, estates, galleries, and non-profit institutions, providing management, curatorial, and other consulting services. At the same time, the company serves institutional as well as private collectors, focusing on developing collections of emerging, mid-career, and established artists. The company also organizes traveling exhibitions both in the United States and abroad.
