Shelley Cook

PROVENANCE: Courtesy of the Artist

This painting is a visual poem about desire – the urge toward true spiritual union, withthe beloved, and with Divine  Love… It reflects the wheel of Dharma, a dialogue between the ephemeral physical world and that which is liberated at death. Like a garden, living and dieing, t portrays a circle unbroken of human existence, The painting was begun by using the artist’s body to make imprintations on the canvas, which was laid on the earth, before it was stretched, using only Earth pigments. the painting process employed layered glazes and scumbling, reflecting on life and decay.

Shelley Cook-Contreras is an internationally exhibited interdisciplinary artist, producing performances, films, and   installation artworks. Her past projects have been funded by the National Endowments for the Arts, Arizona State University’s Institute for Studies in the Arts, and the National Institute of Fine Arts, INBA, in Mexico, the National Fund for the Arts and Culture, FONCA; with the Rockefeller Foundation, and The California Arts Council. In her working philosophy, she states, “I am a cultural worker. I seek to create works that empower with communication and awareness. I approach artmaking as cultural activism. I think of these works as “activators”, providing the spark to I gnite a questioning of our culture and society.”She earned her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute’s New Genres Department. Cook-Contreras has taught Installation Art, Sculpture, and Time-Based Art as a member of the Spatial Arts Faculty of San Jose State University, and in the Women and Spirituality Program at New College of California. She has taken part in bi-national cultural exchanges between the United States and Mexico funded jointly by the Mexican Cultural Association of the Bank of Commerce, BANCOMER; the National Fund for the Arts and Culture, FONCA; and the Rockefeller Foundation. Cook-Contreras is a Bay Area Video Coalition Fellow: a recipient of the Digital Directions Teacher Training Institute Grant, emphasizing digital tools for developing arts curriculum and educational excellence.

Working professionally as an artist and educator for over 25 years, Cook- Contreras has presented workshops and lectures in the US, Mexico, and abroad at such venues as Mexico’s El Chopo Museum, The San Francisco Art Institute; the World Wide Video Festival, Holland; the Institute for Studies in Technology and the Arts, Mexico; and NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, Mexico. She has developed bilingual art pieces, which have been exhibited both in Mexico and the United States. As a cultural worker she encourages students to develop a global and cross-cultural awareness in relationship to art, utilizing a keen observation of the self and the systems in which we live.