INTERGALACTIC PLANETARY: Tracey Snelling

Koffler Arts is thrilled to welcome contemporary artist Tracey Snelling for a solo exhibition, INTERGALICTIC PLANETARY (September 18 – December 14, 2025). Through the use of sculpture, photography, video, and installation, this exhibition is a blend of different worlds, geographies, people, and perspectives, forming a kind of visual and sonic cacophony. It’s a nod to global (or even galactic) unity, and to the idea that despite all the noise and division, we’re more alike than not. This is Snelling’s Canadian debut.

Snelling explains, “Through this work, I ask: how can we move beyond our fears, borders, and egos to become more humane? Perhaps by staying curious, open, and willing to see each other more fully, we can take a small step toward connection, and even a glimmer of peace for the future.”

Intergalactic Planetary brings together imagery and works inspired by cities including Shanghai, Chongqing, Berlin, Tokyo, Bangkok and locations across the United States. The title, appropriated from the iconic Beastie Boys song the artist listened to in her youth, captures something essential to the show: a sense of playfulness and humour, mixed with the idea of universality, a connection that transcends space, borders, and cultures. It evokes the feeling of zooming out and viewing the world through a wider lens — not to erase difference, but to better understand the systems, tensions, and interdependencies that define how we live.

“Accidents happen,” says Matthew Jocelyn, General Director of Koffler Arts. “Sometimes they’re good. Sometimes great! Last September, I was walking across the Lützoplatz in Berlin heading from one exhibition to another, when I saw a sign for a show I had not clocked in my carefully curated program for the day. It was in the Haus am Lützoplatz, and when I walked in, I immediately knew I had stumbled across something very special indeed. Tracey had invested the multiple rooms of this house turned gallery with her astonishing architectural and domestic constructions, creating a visual cacophony of international urban squalidness, that somehow magically enabled the infinite poetry of individualised markings – our need to inscribe some kind of personality into our domestic space, however restricted, however impoverished – to emerge. A form of grace.

While this exhibition could have been demoralizing, it was, in fact, the opposite.   An affirmation of our need to create, to personalise, to make a home of where we are with what we have. It was clear that Tracey Snelling and her work had to come to Toronto.”

For media inquiries please contact Melissa Than mthan@kofflerarts.org.