PHOTO NEW YORK 2005

TRACEY SNELLING

In the installation "Convenient," travel, road trips, and the stops along the way are explored. A projection combines real video with green screen and animation techniques to illustrate a place along the highway, with the conveniences that one needs when stopping: gas, food, and lodging. Through the windows of the motel sculpture, people can be seen doing what they do at motels. The drive-in sculpture plays a dvd "A Long Trip," which again illustrates the constant movement of a long journey from state to state, motel to motel. “Convenient” is a tribute to both the thrill and mundanity of road travel.Influenced by film, landscape, books, and architecture, Tracey Snelling explores reality and scale through the use of sculpture, photography, and video. Mood, time, and a sense of place are captured and distorted. Old buildings, such as motels, are painstakingly recreated in small three-dimensional scale, with dust and weeds surrounding still-blinking neon signs. These sculptures are then photographed, videotaped, or transformed in other ways to further collapse the original object or place that is represented. Often, sound, smell, water, lights, or motors add to the experience of the works.
Snelling’s works are featured in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, de Saisset Museum in Santa Clara, California, the Microsoft Collection in Redmond, Washington, the Progressive Collection in Cleveland, Ohio, and other institutional and private collections.