Snelling and Diaz: Building toward the Future
by Victoria Wolfe
At the 2005 Chicago Contemporary & Classic art fair, Brown Bag Contemporary, a San Francisco gallery, sponsored a collaborative project in an effort to illustrate the creative process by allowing viewers to see a creative interaction. The two artists who played off each other were Tracey Snelling and Salvador Diaz. The most interesting thing about the collaboration is that these two artists come from very different personal histories, use diametrically opposed studio methods, and work with different media and in different styles. Snelling and Diaz, also, managed to discover each other and form a long distance professional friendship that culminated in creating art together, and then they sent their work into the future: two mixed media pieces -- one tabletop structure and one wall work.
In the jointly created artwork we discover dream-inspired buildings from an urban landscape, imagery that in our current society holds tremendous symbolic weight. The entire installation in Brown Bag’s space at CC&C, which included each artist’s solo installation as well as their collaboration, focused on issues and images of change in city architecture. Snelling and Diaz created mixed media building projects full of sentimentality, referencing classic and contemporary art, and inserting new media whirligigs and luminescent wiring which in our postmodern world resonate heartily with the collective unconscious. These city structures -- quirky, personal and full of nostalgia as well as the hum of everyday contemporary life -- show a thematic concern that is, well… monumental.
Tracey Snelling’s solo installation “The City” and Salvador Diaz’s structure entitled “We Moved” flanked the exhibition space. In “We Moved, “ Diaz installed a faux storefront complete with showcase front window across which he painted the words “We Moved” in blood red paint. Behind this ad hoc commercial frame, Diaz hung 48 paintings on newspaper, iconic images loaded with personal reference. Diaz is an oil painter with the painterly facility and tradition of European masters. He generally paints on canvas and linen, but has a recently produced a series of work on newspaper. Newspaper would seem like a very unlikely surface for an artist with such a seemly traditional bent. Tracey Snelling commented that, “I originally saw a painting of
Salvador’s at Art Chicago a few years ago. It was a young boy dressed for Halloween, and it was painted with a lush and rich quality that made the image sentimental and disturbing. It had an edge. That’s when I knew that this was the work of an amazing painter and I set out to form a friendship with him.” The long distance between the Mexican hilltops of Monterrey and the California urban landscape of Oakland was bridged by professional admiration.
Diaz moved to Monterrey when he was eight, a lucky survivor of a disastrous earthquake that claimed the lives of 20,000 people and left 90,000 homeless in his city of birth, Tlatelolco. Architecture from Aztec times, Spanish colonialism and modern commerce and apartments stand side-by-side in the city where he was born, and he agrees that this constant reminder of death and renewal informs his own work. Since 1985 Diaz has lived in Monterrey, and as an artist who has witnessed so much destruction and resurrection, the contemporary architecture that fills this modern commercial city must seem merely temporary. The words “We Moved” painted in red across the storefront window are what Diaz considers most important in his installation, and for good reason. The images behind the façade include faces, memories, snippets from his childhood, all painted in oil on newspaper. One painting directly behind the letters on the window shows a map of Monterrey with a big arrow pointing to the great beyond and again the words “We Moved.”
Steven Turner, Director of Brown Bag Contemporary, pinpoints Diaz’s distinctive style. “Salvador will paint elegant. very realistic work on canvas or linen. Then, on newspapers, he will create raw and rough images. When you see his paintings in person, regardless of medium, they hit you with a power and sense of realization that allow for only one conclusion: This work was made by Salvador Diaz.”
Diaz explains that he started painting on newspaper out of financial necessity, but then developed a passion for it. “I’d been collecting newspaper clippings and I knew at the same time the works by Alfredo Ramos Martinez, Mathias Goeritz, and Willem de Kooning who all used newspapers,” Diaz explains. “They had pieces that were over thirty years old and are well conserved. So I started using newspapers in 1998 and never stopped. As an artist, using newspaper allows me to have a conversation with the world. I make the selection of the news that I want to keep and want to ignore but a sense of randomness always exists. Newsprint is more than just a medium for my art, it is by itself information that is sometimes funny, other times serious or cruel.”
Snelling’s solo installation for Brown Bag Contemporary, which she called “The City,” stands 10’ tall, stretches 10’ wide and runs 8’ deep, and is comprised of four separate components: Downtown, Another Alley, Seedy, and The City Never Sleeps.
It is a series of old brownstones and industrial buildings, reminiscent of the older outskirts of Brooklyn, NY. Her choice of an urban landscape is a natural progression from her oeuvre of photos and mixed media sculpture capturing small town Americana. Snelling has a distinctly postmodern inclination, as she mix-matches new media techniques with old school construction work. She starts with a favorite photo or a memory, using it as a model for dioramic sculpture, which she then photographs in context. Galleries often exhibit the handmade structure alongside its inspirational image and its ultimate reconstructed photograph. In that way she leads the viewer to a series of questions, finally asking: where is the illusion and where reality?
All of her art is at once playful and haunting. Her subjects are drawn from B movie references and images recalled from long trips through the American countryside with her family. “I spent a lot of time in the back of the car watching the scenery, and hours in the International creating art out of whatever was around. I also read the paperbacks my parents had finished and discarded. I distinctly remember reading “the Shining” all the way through,” Snelling explains with a laugh. “When I worked with the California Conservation Corps and then after that as a firefighter with the US Forest Service, I got to see lots of interesting landscapes and places. And it’s in there, in my work.”
“The City” sports flashy signage, collage effects and hardcore construction: all easily within the artist’s range of materials. A point of interest in her work overall is her use of words and fuller phrases to reveal a lonely film noir reality. Diaz enjoys Snelling’s taste for the darker side. He explains, “I’m attracted to the urban subject matter in her work and the personality of the places by themselves. I feel a hard silence, a solitude in these remote places that she imagines, and you can fill in the empty space with memories. When I look at a work by Tracey, I feel like a giant poised in an undetermined location, watching from a removed perspective and trying to understand the life of someone else.”
According to Steven Turner, Brown Bag has wanted to put together a Snelling-Diaz collaborative project for some time now, but wanted the right venue for it. “Tracey and Salvador have been talking about a collaboration, but they both keep very busy independent schedules. This time around the idea arose simultaneously, when Tracey and I were discussing certain developments surrounding the Chicago Contemporary & Classic Show. We decided that the Navy Pier would be the ideal locale for this installation: the organization and atmosphere of the event was conducive to what we were proposing….”
Art pieces were created in full view center stage in the exhibition space. Snelling and Diaz produced two pieces together: a tabletop construction and a wall hanging. They had decided ahead of time which materials they would need and discussed generally how they would work, but they decided to leave to chance whatever occurred on site throughout the four days of the fair. They each started one of the two collaborative pieces and alternated working on their own and adding to other’s creation, continuously developing both. They created separate work spaces, sharing only a table, each maintaining their area in the manner most comfortable to their habits. As it turned out, their work styles couldn’t be more different, and the dialectic of style was at times amusing and sometimes challenging, but never a source of disagreement.
“In his studio, Salvador works under immaculate conditions, in stark contrast to Tracey.” Steven Turner found the contradiction fun but baffling. “I tried to maintain a good working environment for each artist, out of respect for their personal space. As they handed their respective pieces back and forth, it was interesting to see how each treated the other’s object.” Diaz initiated the wall work, a piece that is 66” tall x 32” wide x 6” deep entitled “The Greatest Moments” after a headline on newsprint selected for its thematic relation to their project. Diaz painted the first parts of it, and then passed the piece to Snelling. “It was a different experience from my usual solo work, because my side was clean just with the newspaper, oil painting tubes, paint brushes, and so on,” Diaz reflected. “Tracey used a lot more materials and tools. I put three Chicago newspapers together vertically to create the building image that I chose from a news story about a fire. The title came from something I read on top of the other newspaper, the text is "The Greatest Moments" and in lettering that is of the same sort of old design as the neon lights that Tracey used. Tracey made two pieces to integrate as part of the building with neon lights and stickers on the newspaper.”
Snelling initiated the second collaborative piece, a tabletop construction, calling it “Yes or No.” Depending on whom you ask, Turner, Diaz and Snelling say that this is a building that could be a motel or a brownstone apartment building, or perhaps just an old city building that remains undefined. Snelling remembers covering the first part of the structure with lightweight spackle, “but then I had to wait for it to dry, so in the meanwhile I walked to the pier to scrounge some extra wood from the union guys and used that to start building the other buildings that would attach to the wall with the newspapers. My part seemed to take much longer -- we had to wait for the spackle to dry, then it needed to be sanded, then bricks were carved in and painted. The work is time consuming.” Snelling then added a small TV to the tabletop piece. “Salvador painted a mural on the side of it, and he also added smears and drops of paint to the whole building, to make it look old and painterly. I put a small handheld TV behind one window and we let it play whatever station we could find. The commercials didn’t work too well. I liked the Spanish soap operas best.”
Diaz recounts his part of the tabletop building. “On “Yes or No” I painted graffiti on one side of it, and two murals on its walls. One of the murals is the image of the limited edition card or poster where Tracey made a digital intervention on an oil-on-newspaper that I made. It is based on a detail of Vermeer's painting. As a result I remembered an idea of the documentary movie directed by Agnes Varda, "The Glaneurs and I." Diaz was inspired by the free association that was generated working with an admired colleague.
Turner summarized the collaboration of the artists with an anecdote that he says he will always cherish. “Tracey works in a very free form fashion, while Salvador is meticulous from the start, taking his time and executing his work in a very deliberate fashion. It might take Tracey ten minutes to create a wooden structure, and cover it with plaster, during which the wood dust and plaster goop is flying all over, not just in the work area, but all over her and sometimes onto the observers. Salvador, on the other hand, might take ten minutes to sand one wall on the tabletop structure, holding it at a fully-extended arm’s length, carefully rubbing the sandpaper in only a downward direction to keep the dust from dispersing throughout the work area.”
Diaz and Snelling both report feeling enriched and expanded from the experience. Snelling admired her collaborator’s facility with paint. “I saw how effortlessly Salvador paints. After we finished working together, he started a new image on a newspaper with an evident Italian theme – before my eyes, I watched as he recreated DaVinci’s Mona Lisa, but in the first stages of it, she seemed to be balding and a man! Eventually Salvador added some hair on top, and there she was, Mona Lisa. I still wonder if he changed his mind midway through or if he switched it all around to amuse himself. The process fascinated me.”
Diaz’s memory of the collaboration is full of warm feeling. “I did learn from the collaboration in Chicago... How can I explain it? Imagine that I am in my house where I have been living my entire life, and suddenly I find doors that I never have used before and windows that I have never seen before. And I know that I can trust to use them because of the quality of person who used her creativity and vision in building them.
After collaborating with Tracey, I changed the feeling of nervousness for certainty. It was a very good experience.” Snelling wants more. “I would like to collaborate in other ways, too, with Salvador. He sent me small paintings on newspaper a year or so ago. I plan to incorporate these into a sculpture at some point. I want to send him a raw, unfinished building, so he can paint it. This would be a long distance collaboration.”
Collaboration in the midst of a bustling art fair can only be called performance. Since artists are one of our last resources for a moral conscience, one has to look more closely at a project where two creative minds engage together. Even more intriguing in this case, Diaz and Snelling made collaborative art with participation of onlookers who influence the collaboration merely by being there. So then what did Diaz and Snelling bring forth? Art that comments on our urban life, imaginary buildings that celebrate a long-ago era in the city, full of headlines, neon lights, and assorted personal dramas. The viewer can peek into a window or read a clipping of newspaper to learn more. One has so much to do when looking at either of these collaborative pieces. So then aren’t “Yes or No” and “The Greatest “Moments” quintessential buildings of choice, as labeled?
The buildings that hold the most meaning for any society and especially so in our current emotional landscape are those that serve our basic everyday needs. Salvador Diaz and Tracey Snelling, artists from very different hometowns, created symbols of urban life in the midst of the crossroads of commerce and creativity, at a contemporary art fair in an old and revered metropolis, Chicago. Throughout the four days of the fair, Brown Bag Contemporary sold a limited edition collaborative print by Snelling & Diaz at an affordable $20, low cost by art fair standards. Anyone who purchased a print was automatically entered into a lottery drawing for the collaborative pieces, and “Yes or No” and “The Greatest Moments” were raffled off at the close of the show. When all was finished, everyone in attendance -- artists, collectors, gallerists, innocent bystanders – packed up their belongings and headed home, back to everyday life. The finished art work went that-a-way, too.
