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.

Image:
Julie Schenkelberg
Lemurian Shift, 2015
Vintage molding, porch ceilings, chairs, lathe, barrel parts, vintage boat sails- painted, folded painted fabric bundles, carrara marble, plaster cast vintage punch cups, scrap metal from cars, industrial waste, bed springs.
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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.

Julie Schenkelberg received a BA in Art History at the College of Wooster, OH, and an 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. Her large-scale installations have been displayed in solo exhibitions at 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 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 The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE, Art Omi, Ghent, NY, Projekstom Normanns, Norway, and most recently the Red Bull House of Art, Detroit, 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 lives and works in Detroit.