BIO

Julie Schenkelberg grew up in the post-industrial landscape of Cleveland, Ohio. Her mixed-media installations start with furniture, dishware, textiles, and marble, combined with concrete, resin, and construction materials, to transform notions of domesticity, and engage with the American Rust Belt's legacy of abandonment and decay. Using the home as a playground for formal and conceptual subversions, the work aggressively disrupts cohesion within the physical sphere. Familiar furnishings rekindle memories or premonitions of collapse, suggesting both the utter destruction of war, calamities, or urban decay, but also the uncanny juxtapositions of fragile substances such as cloth and china, with industrial materials such as rusty metal, heavy concrete, and tool-made marks such as drilled holes and chain-sawed indentations. In addition her work is greatly influenced by her eighteen years of professional experience of working in the theater as a scenic painter. She has worked in NYC at a high level and other cities for many theaters and production houses.

Julie Schenkelberg received a BA in Art History at the College of Wooster, OH, and MFA at the School of Visual Arts, NY, with additional studies at SAIC at Oxbow, MI, Pont Aven School of Contemporary Art, France, and the Institute of European Studies, Vienna. She is represented for ten years by Asya Geisberg Gallery, located in Chelsea in Manhattan, NY. . Her large-scale installations have been displayed in solo exhibitions at The Detroit-Volterra Foundation, Italy, The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH, the Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh, PA, the University of Akron Meyers School of Art, Akron, OH, Beeler Gallery, OH, Plug Projects, MO, and UNTITLED Miami Beach, FL. Schenkelberg was a 2019 finalist for the Foundwork Artist Prize, and the Burke Prize of the Museum of Art and Design in New York, and the Knight Arts Challenge Grant in Detroit, MI. She won the 2014 ArtPrize Installation Juried Award for her installation "Symptomatic Constant", and has received four National Endowment for the Arts Grants, the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, and a Harpo Foundation Grant. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY, Volterra-Detroit Foundation Residency, Italy, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE, Art Omi, Ghent, NY, Projekstom Normanns, Norway, the Red Bull House of Art, Detroit, MI, and SiTE:LAB, Grand Rapids, MI. Press includes Artforum, The New Yorker, PBS, Bloomberg, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Art F City, The Huffington Post, Beautiful Decay and Ground Magazine.

She works in NYC, Cleveland and Detroit. She also frequently moves her life for months to a year at a time to work on site-specific projects and attend residencies- a nomadic life dedicated to her art practice.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I create sculptures and installations about finding beauty and meaning in post-industrial mess. Using discarded industrial materials and once revered domestic objects, I create places of sacred arrival, unearthing stories and regenerating lost beauty.

I do this primarily through frieze like wall sculpture, through drawings, and site-specific installations. Over the past decade, I have created large scale projects in a myriad of locations, ranging from vacant buildings to museum and gallery spaces, constructed with found materials from scrap yards, dumpsters, construction sites, estate sales and family members. I often cut invasively into buildings and furniture, and make castings of objects, altering their states in order to release their forgotten stories and allow their energy to be transformed. I draw from a vast personal language in my practice, including folded fabric, cast heirloom cups specific to my family, and scrap metal, reflecting my rust belt heritage (born in Cleveland), but I often research and incorporate objects specific to a project’s location. These installations seek to excavate a bygone history embodied in these abandoned buildings, objects, lives, jobs and stories. I interpret them into a new story of remembrance, transition into a new phase and a healing of the past. The sacredness of these industrial ruins and domestic objects and spaces inspire my story and hold the foundation for my work. My current work is informed by research in Italy about ruins of older civilizations and my interest in medieval early religions, alchemical symbology, mystic sacred geometry in drawings and in architecture. I am paying attention to how sacred space and symbol is important across cultures and noticing the common similarities to my explorations in the mid-west. I plan to continue evolving in light of these exciting new observations in my approach to my practice to create sacred and healing spaces.

**Gathering glass material in Detroit.**