March 2011

SECCA in Winston-Salem, NC, Offers Works by Tracey Snelling

The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, NC, will present the exhibit, Woman on the Run, featuring an installation by artist Tracey Snelling, on view from Mar. 1 through May 27, 2012. A reception and gallery talk will be held on Mar. 1, beginning at 7pm.

It’s a dark and stormy night, with neon motel signs providing the only glow. Out of the shadows of dingy back alleys and tired brick storefronts, there is a woman trying to slip away. The only thing she leaves behind is the hollow sound of spiked heels clattering on the sidewalk. What has she done? Where is she running?

Film noir intrigue comes alive in Tracey Snelling’s stage set installation Woman on the Run at The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art.

SECCA Executive Director Mark Leach says, “Snelling’s work is continually evolving as it changes in the eyes of each person who walks through her sculptural maze. While she leaves a constellation of clues as to who the woman is, and what she’s done, Snelling presents no answers. In a sense, the mystery of the story becomes the core of an exhibition that never reaches a full conclusion.”

In Woman on the Run, Snelling evokes a world of black & white Hollywood crime thrillers where the lines between good and evil becomes tantalizingly blurred. Within the exhibition space Snelling creates a world unto itself, where audiences will walk through pieces of a city and an abandoned motel room. The woman is the protagonist, and the question remains what did she do and did she really do it?

Snelling builds sets of all scales, from toy model to lifesize, that map the seedy, but unmasked sides of cities across America. This exhibition brings cinema to life, and invites the viewer inside to navigate a world of femme fatales, gritty theatre, and the questions of female representation in film. The viewer lives the mystery and follows a trail of clues through film, video, sculpture and environment.

SECCA Curator of Contemporary Art Steven Matijcio says, “In anticipation of the River Run film festival and the film lovers it brings out, Snelling’s Woman on the Run allows people to experience cinema in an expanded field. Without a beginning or end, the audience is thrust into the middle of a retro crime drama whose meaning accumulates with every additional step through the set. One can only really know this experience by becoming part of its world.”

The exhibition was collaboratively produced by The Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, TN, and SECCA. Woman on the Run recently showed at the 21C Museum in Louisville, KY, and will be presented at the newly re-named Virginia MoCA this Fall.

The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art is an affiliate of the North Carolina Museum of Art, a division of the NC Department of Cultural Resources. SECCA is also a funded partner of The Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County. Additional funding is provided by the James G. Hanes Memorial Fund.

The NC Department of Cultural Resources annually serves more than 19 million people through its 27 historic sites, seven history museums, two art museums, the nation’s first state supported symphony orchestra, the State Library, the NC Arts Council and the State Archives.

The NC Department of Cultural Resources serves as a champion for North Carolina’s creative industry, which employs nearly 300,000 North Carolinians and contributes more than $41 billion to the state’s economy. To learn more visit (www.ncculture.com).

For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listing, call the Center at 336/725-1904 or visit (www.secca.org).

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