Shalene Valenzuela

Shalene Valenzuela was born and raised in Santa Barbara, California. She received a BA in Art Practice at the University of California at Berkeley and an MFA in Ceramics from California College of Arts and Crafts.

Shalene has participated in artist residencies at the Archie Bray Foundation (2006), Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (2004, 2011), The Clay Studio of Missoula (2007-09), the LH Project (2016), and Red Lodge Clay Center (2024). She has taught at Flathead Valley Community College, University of Montana, Oregon College of Art and Craft, The Clay Studio of Missoula, Missoula Art Museum, Richmond Art Center, ASUC Studios at UC Berkeley, and CCA Extended Education. Shalene has been a guest artist and speaker at a number of art centers, colleges, and universities. Her work has been featured in several group and solo exhibitions and is in several private and public collections.  She currently maintains an active studio practice at her home and is the executive director at The Clay Studio of Missoula.

I create ceramic sculptures that reflect on a range of social and cultural issues through a thoughtful, yet somewhat humorous and ironic lens. I reproduce everyday objects primarily through slip casting and activate their surfaces with hand-painted imagery. Through these works, I explore themes of feminism, impossible beauty standards, consumerism, politics, environmental concerns, and the broader whitewashing of American culture and lived experience.

I employ trompe l’oeil techniques not only to visually deceive the viewer, but to draw them more deeply into the narratives embedded within the work. By reinventing familiar objects in clay, I play with the notion that things are not what they initially appear to be. Materials behave against expectation. What should be soft becomes rigid while what should be heavy and indestructible becomes fragile and precious. Though the referenced object remains recognizable, the illustrated surface complicates its meaning, layering critique and storytelling onto the form itself.

The objects I choose to portray in my work are deliberately those that have presence in our past and/or present lives but don’t necessarily hold significant material value. These are objects and tools of convenience, often mass-produced, overly marketed, and easily overlooked. They reside in kitchens, closets, garages, and dusty corners.  My use of mold making and slip casting pays homage to industrial processes and replication, echoing systems of mass production. However, each piece within a series contains distinct imagery and narrative, contradicting the uniformity of the objects they reference and asserting individuality within repetition.

Stylistically, my imagery draws from dated sources associated with idealized moments in American advertising and popular culture. Like advertising itself, these images present a polished veneer that conceals more complex and often contradictory truths. Vibrant colors and appealing figures initially draw in the viewer. But closer inspection reveals subtle tensions—expressions, gestures, and details that point to peril, conflict, or discomfort. The work invites viewers to linger, rewarding attention with layered meaning. The devil is in the details.