Julie Schenkelberg

The idea behind the Midlothian Chapel is to bring history, engaging thought, material exploration, and mystery to the viewer. It is an example of my large-scale installation. I have a theater production background as a professional scenic painter and draw from this experience to transport us to other places, our body feeling suspended in the space as a player. This work is site-specific to two places--Shafer, Minnesota and Bloomington, Indiana-- and entwined with my philosophies of spiritualism, the Rust Belt and reclamation of spaces.  

It is my goal to create reflection about lost and demolished cultures, to give the viewer a chance to be transported to another world and time. While the immediate reference for this piece is the Midwestern Rust Belt, my hope is that in its evocation of bygone eras and transformation, the work cuts across cultures. I would like the viewer to reflect on places other than where they are from but also see something familiar in the work. In creating this installation, I looked for inspiration from ancient symbols, archeology, and my travels as an artist in Italy, Norway, and the British Isles. The installation was also informed by visual studies of sacred and occult texts from the Lilly Library. My work embraces notions of death--how we preserve culture and allow other parts to decay-- and touches rebirth and renewal from destruction. I create my imaginary worlds with unlikely materials discarded from the domestic and industrial worlds.  

During my time at IU, I traveled to Scotland and visited structures that invoked mystery to me about their past, most notably the Rosslyn Chapel in the town of Midlothian. The chapel is full of hidden meaning embodied in its many stone symbols of dragons, angels, goddesses, the green man, craftsmen portraits and sacred geometry. Intrigued how the chapel hides meaning in architecture, much the way the buildings on the Bloomington campus embed the past, (such as the dragons from Maxwell Hall) I was inspired to create my own chapel-like structure that would honor both our collective industrial past and the intangible, sacred aspect of our human experience. The chapel honors industry –darkness- on one side and the sacred –light- on the other. 

The installation holds many earthly elements that tell another ethereal spiritual message, as listed below. It is meant to honor the earthly and the unseen but felt.  

Prisms: They transform light into another world, symbolizing the radiant divine celestial light. These two halves of light and dark create a whole world, one not without the other. They are like sarcophagi holding history, relics and symbolism for being.  

Salt: There are 1500 pounds of salt in the piece. Specific to the Rust Belt and Great Lakes - an ancient sea mined beneath the lakes. Geology and in its crystalline form Halite. It symbolizes spiritual renewal, balance and protection. 

Salem Limestone: Specific to Bloomington and its industry and beautiful buildings. Formed by an ancient shallow sea from the compacted shells of millions of dead marine organisms. 

Metal: Steel, fire, industry, Rust Belt, power, fallen empire, destruction of the earth, revered, beauty. Gathered from Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Bloomington. 

Wood: From fallen trees in Shafer, Minnesota and old barn wood salvaged in Bloomington, Indiana. History, found remnants of fallen homes compressed into abstraction, life, death and the raw material of the forest and the earth taken advantage of.  

Blue Plaster: Fixed water in plaster, castings form the campus, cemeteries and family heirlooms set the tables, dragons and lore, goddess and the Virgin Mary. Snails, books, flowers, filigree, bunnies, and devils. The dark and light. Ancient-looking objects. The surreal of the blue and other-worldliness and higher consciousness. The mundaneness of everyday wear of things, dishes, designating materials, concrete and mold.  

White Fabric: Representing the ethereal, the domestic, surrender, acceptance, pure beauty, discarded curtains, the over-ideal. Peace.  

Vertical Lines: Alluding to the unknown, blurring the lines of reality and the beyond. The endless horizon.  

Diamond Drawings: A geometric makeup of all beings and energy, the artist imagines walking into a portal of the beyond and leaves the viewer to decide where to. 

2017, mixed media.

Installation at Projekstrom Normanns Gallery, Stravanger, Norway.

Built with natural materials found in the region, stone, sand, sea water, soil and branches. Covered in concrete and filtered lighting. 

Installation Infinite, Octagonal Pavilion

My work is about the convergence of the inbetween, the liminal and the unseen. I make installations that bring together earthly materials trying to describe our otherworldly experience. I use post-industrial materials, the after domestic and the dropped histories. I combine them in space so the body can enter and experience a new vibration. I investigate our new world created by the discarded and imprinted. Family histories imagined and post industry cities. 

In sacred geometry, the octagon is a combination of a circle and a square, which represents an infinite connection between the energies of heaven and earth. In architecture it is considered a symbol of renewal and rebirth. The eight sides of the octagon are the infinity sign incarnate. We can enter a sacred space of a building that is eight sided. Our body comes into this space of eternal energy, manifesting what we bring into it, amplifying meaning we transfer. 

Infinity or the sideways symbol of the 8- is the divine expression of boundlessness- of time, energy, possibilities. It relates to calculations, science and the divine. Unbreakable bonds, endless love and divine compassion. Limitless. Absolute. Immeasurable. Ths symbol is the wealth of eternal wisdom, awareness of the endless rhythms of nature in repetition, the consciousness beyond the soul, the interconnectedness of our being to all things and others. 

In churches the baptistry building itself can be an octagon symbolizing the infinite as we enter into the building. The Pavilion is like this.

I intend to build a three foot high “well fountain”  that emulates the octagonal shape of the building as well as the roof. The installation will have a cloth sail that is attached at the top peak of the interior of the roof cascading down to the fountain, making a heavenly and earthly connection, as well as creating an abstract hourglass shape of the 8 and infinity sign, looping forever. 

Inside this octagonal well fountain, I will create piles of castings that have symbolism that links to our human poetry of mystery and existence, flowers in plaster from grave stones in Lakeview cemetery, from wooden furniture in Yaddo, from family heirlooms, from industrial spaces,  I will create a well of these materials that climb up the cloth sail and fill the fountain. There will also be choice parts of furniture and domestic wooden discarded objects, playing at climbing from earth to heaven, cascading up and down.

The Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh, PA

2015

A link to the museum and more detail images of the show are here.

TRANSMIGRATION

The house was built in 1910. The project materials are: dismantled, wood, plaster, fabric, paint, concrete, lighting. 25’x20’x25’—2016. This installation was a part of the curatorial group SiTE:LAB The Rumsey Street Project, Art Prize, Grand Rapids, Michigan. The home was moved by trucks (by SiTE:LAB) to a new location and foundation to appear as if it is on a pedestal. Materials were removed from the house and repositioned onto the surfaces. The drop ceilings in the home were removed exposing the fire damage from the coal-burning stove that once existed in the kitchen. All the plaster was removed from the walls and the exterior walls were removed allowing light to stream in and out of the structure.

About this project: NEA grant was given to dissect an entire house in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The house was a gift to the artist for Habitat for Humanity- apart of the larger project for redevelopment after the project was completed and demolished. I lived in the community for a year and mobilized local young people to help with the process in an internship.

Produced at Franconia Sculpture Park 2021

Press - The 25th Anniversary Celebration

The dimensions are 16 feet x 25 feet x 7 feet.

The materials are found wood from homes, welded steel, scrap metal and gravel from the area, crushed glass, vintage windows and doors, vintage furniture, metal grating, screens, twine, paint, cast materials made from: concrete, plaster, pigment and local limestone mixture.

The piece is intended to be a sacred place that the viewer can venture through contemplating the sacred feminine on the south side of the piece. It refers to the goddess that appears throughout religions in human history, points to the artist's family origin, what is held sacred to them and reverence for domestic life. The cast relics are held in a glass encased sanctuary the view can access by standing in front of.

The artist spent a great deal of time observing nature before finding the placement of the work, noticing where the sun and moon rise over the field.

On the north side of the piece it holds scrap metal and cut pine trees from the area, laid out like a grave. This portion of the piece shows reverence of the post industrial history of the midwest which is a strong theme in the artist's work. She recognizes the decay of the past and how it informs the future in its beauty and struggle of places to reinvent the current time.

The piece has lightness and darkness much like good and evil of the religious context.

2015, mixed media.

This Installation was exhibited at UNTITLED Miami 2015 as a special project through the curatorial group SiTE:LAB.

Lumerian Shift is constructed with materials accumulated over years from home demolition and scrapyards. Vintage molding, porch ceilings, chairs, lathe, barrel parts, vintage boat sails,  folded painted fabric bundles, carrara marble, plaster cast vintage punch cups, scrap metal from cars, industrial waste, and painted bed springs.

2017, mixed media,  176" x 86" x 157".

Constructed during the residency at The Red Bull House of Art in Detroit. 

The installation is composed of a taxidermy fawn, found objects, burnt house wood, Hydrocal plaster casts of artist‘s family personal items. Jewelry, dishware, silverware, paraffin wax castings, books, marble from demolished buildings, cast and real 1917 vintage ceiling tiles, wood lath from demolished convent, cotton fabric,  gold and silver leaf, mirrors, waxed paper, shredded and grated tires, wax cast windows, figurines and cups, chair with fabric strips dipped in wax, small table with cast wax items. 

2018 , mixed media, 78”x45”x30." 

Solo show at Asya Geisberg Gallery.

The installation is a sarcophagus imagined to be for the artist,  to travel into the next world with precious cast items of her family's possessions and rubble from destroyed buildings in the region she was born (Detroit/Cleveland- the Mid-West). The blue wax pieces are cast family heirlooms from the artist's family, plates and an altered figure of the virgin Mary derived from the catholic faith. The exterior of the piece is covered in cast and silver leafed hyrdocal-plaster spoons from the artists great-grandfather. The interior of the installation has broken carrera marble, burned wood from destroyed homes, glass from abandoned auto factories and found metal from factory floors. 

Continuum, 2020

The main installation for

Asya Geisberg Gallery

solo show From the Ashes.

Materials: 1890’s oak secretary desk, brass claw feet from vintage dining room table, wood from Ohio, found oyster-shells (Cape Cod Bay), patent leather, paper, vintage fabric, plaster, wisteria vine, acrylic paint, found drift wood (Lake Erie), Carrara Marble, Metal found (Detroit)

59.50h x 35w x 29d in

151.13h x 88.90w x 73.66d cm

Swan Song, 2015 Solo show at Asya Geisberg Gallery

Detail of this show can be seen here at Asya Geisberg Gallery
 

Site specific installation made with reclaimed lath, wood, marble, iron, paper, vintage furniture, dish-ware, figurines, natural debris, crushed reclaimed metal, light fixtures, vintage wedding dresses, bathtub, wallpaper, plaster, paint. Dimensions variable.

 Symptomatic Constant (Shipwreck in the Mid-West) mixed media, 20'x 30' x 19', 2014.

Detail of this project can be seen here with the curatorial group SiTE:LAB

“Symptomatic Constant” is my representation of a shipwreck in the Midwest. This installation was produced for Art Prize with the curatorial group SiTE:LAB. 

The environment is a former 1920’s hotel lobby in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that was sealed for 40 years. It was created for Art Prize and won the Juried Installation Award for $20,000. It is filled with items locally sourced from the area, including retired sails from a Lake Michigan boat and local scrap yard materials. The piece touches on the twisting turmoil of objects and domestic places in upheaval. The installation emerges from its firm grounding of earth and envisioned water, reaching toward the tranquil place in the sky beyond the storm.

Installation for solo show at Asya Geisberg Gallery 2013

details for this show can be seen here at Asya Geisberg Gallery

Hearsay,  89" x 58" x 92", 2013:

This is the front side view of the installation. This view is made of these materials selected discarded materials from the streets of NYC: Dining room table, staircase spindles, exterior doors, newel post, bureau parts, church bench, cabinet doors, end table, cast furniture remnants, vintage 1940's glass lens, resin, wool, window frames, concrete, cattle fencing wire, black velvet, marble, rusted steel roof tar, aluminum, yarn, gold mica powder and shellac, silk and resin

CURRANT explores Julie Schenkelberg’s experience in returning home to Cleveland. A play on the word “current,” the exhibition speaks to her present moment with the installation forming a massive altar dedicated to the past and present in addition to the mysterious, restorative and transformative future. Schenkelberg weaves imagery of her own history through an archeological collection of castings of plants, religious symbols, abandoned buildings, and family dish ware while paying homage to the history of place with castings of tombstones found in Lakeview Cemetery. The title, CURRANT, also references the violet colored berry which is said to provide assistance to those in fearful situations, especially when facing the self in being truly alone. The violet black color of the berry, a unifying element found throughout her installation, is also known as a curative pigment with high vibrational healing qualities in spiritual circles.

2017, mixed media.

Installation at Plug Projects in Kansas City.

The installation at PLUG Projects partnered with the Kansas City, Missouri Office of Culture and Creative Services and the Kansas City Design Center as part of the “West Bottoms Reborn,” a project supported by the National Endowment for the Arts Our Town Grant. This project is part of a series of public engagements designed to honor the history (and place) of the historic West Bottoms in Kansas City, Mo. Incorporating materials from the region as a representation and indicator of site, the artist responded to the West Bottoms’ rich history by building a site-specific installation with materials form the region, in the gallery of PLUG Projects. 

2012, mixed media, 35’ x 40’ x 25’.

The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art: The Okada Building

This installation was a site specific work completed in the Okada Building at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska. The installation is made of vintage lamps, wooden furniture, wood paneling, fabric, paint, plaster, resin, metal wire, and string.

Homage to Finding

2018, 30h x 51w in

cast wax and burnt found wood

This sculpture holds wax casts of artist‘s family personal items. Jewelry, dish-ware, silverware, books, virgin Mary statues, mirrors, the black is burnt wood gathered from burned homes in Detroit.

The work was displayed first at Asya Geisberg Gallery for the solo show Reliquary and then at The Museum of Arts and Design in 2019/2020.

From the exhibition catalogue from The Museum of Arts and Design:

”The Burke Prize reinforces the Museum of Arts and Design’s commitment to celebrating the next generation of artists working in and advancing the disciplines that shaped the American studio craft movement. Named for Marian and Russell Burke, two passionate collectors of craft and longtime supporters of MAD, the prize is an unrestricted award of $50,000 given to a professional artist age forty-five or under working in glass, fiber, clay, metal, and/or wood. The winner was selected by a jury of professionals in the fields of art, craft, and design. The prize is accompanied by Burke Prize 2019, an exhibition of the winner and fifteen finalists.”

Solo show at Asya Geisberg Gallery

September 12- October 24, 2020

Asya Geisberg Gallery is pleased to present "From the Ashes", the fifth solo presentation of Julie Schenkelberg. "From the Ashes" is both a timely response to the moment we find ourselves in, and a continuation of the artist's symbolic excavation and elevation of discarded or decaying forms. While we all hope that the present is but a blip of malaise that will recede in our memories, its anxiety and insecurity speaks to a cultural upheaval that we have experienced numerous times. While Schenkelberg's inspiration originated in her Midwestern Rust-Belt environs and its endless stream of material, from the former auto factories of Detroit to the crumbling Art-Deco banks of Cleveland, her references now scour a vaster visual dictionary of decay, hope, and rebuilding. Combining research in ancient symbols of the sacred across societies with physical detritus gathered throughout the US, Schenkelberg marries ever wider ranging ideas and visual entry points.

Comprised of wall sculptures and a mid-sized installation, "From the Ashes" feels less theatrical than previous iterations of the architectural, vast, site-specific works for which Schenkelberg has become known. Distilled into concentrated portions, the work is more archival, and human-scaled, as if a recluse hired an archaeologist to painstakingly sort through decades of artifacts stuffed in their attic. But rather than the classic hoarder's anguished psychological disarray witnessed in piles of inconsequential rot, we feel a reverential motivation - as if deifying scraps of a saint's robes into a spot-lit relic chamber. Schenkelberg somehow manages to have us both recognize the rudimentary origin of her collections, and also see its crystallized transformation into an ethereal combination of concrete lived experience transformed into the sublimely sacred and universal.

Rusted metal parts, the artist's paintings of sacred or alchemical symbols, natural elements weathered by climate, glass washed up on the beach, keepsakes and their containers all recur as motifs in the exhibition. Jewelry boxes, frames, and curio cabinets give a hint of geometry, with parallel yet not quite methodical arrangements. Fragments are symbolically preserved in clear resin, or anchored in plaster. Enigmatic associations across time and place confound any easy connotations, such as Schenkelberg's inclusion of glass slides with images of ancient art, itself an abandoned technology of an image of a ruin. The show's main installation, "Continuum", suggests a mystical cabinet of curiosities, written in a symbolic ancient language. A strangely precious air to the ruins thus compiled permeates the work, as if the narrator of this story is trying to recreate a portrait, using only dilapidated and fragmented clues as their starting point. For us, seeing the world in 2020, Schenkelberg's simultaneous omnivorous interests and narrative restraint allows for us to import our own story, and to hope for a recovery that will inevitably spring forth.

Exhibited at Expo Chicago 2018 with Asya Geisberg Gallery

Wishing Well, 2018 Furniture, fabric, hydrocal cast, ash

44h x 40w x 45.50d in
111.76h x 101.60w x 115.57d cm

The mixed-media installations uses furniture, dish-ware, textiles, and marble, combined with concrete, resin, and construction materials, to transform notions of domesticity, and engage with the Mid-West’s Rust Belt's legacy of abandonment and decay. The installation "Wishing Well” is comprised of mid-century furniture, personal heirlooms, materials from abandoned homes in Michigan, and casts of Madonna figures and Dutch Boys. Using locally sourced materials, the piece references Gothic architecture and Roman ruins like the temple of Jupiter, a space remade into a Christian church, reinterpreted, reinvented, and appropriated. Fabric waterfalls and ash from Michigan buildings as well as crystal shapes suggest transformation, rebirth, and spiritual journeys.

The Unfounded Future of the Untold

SiTE: LAB, Art Prize 2013 : A large site-specific installation in the now-abandoned Public Museum of Natural History in Grand Rapids, MI, built in 1939. 

Details about this project can be seen here at the SiTE:LAB website.

2010 Asya Geisberg Gallery solo show

Details for these three installation pieces and smaller sculptures can be seen here, at Asya Geisberg Gallery.

Inhabiting Ten Eyck: 2014 (press release for this group show is here)
14 site-specific installations at Storefront Ten Eyck curated by Karin Bravin. Includes work by Lisa Beck, Nathan Dilworth, Devon Dikeou, Dave Eppley, Julie Evans, Ivelisse Jimenez, Beth Krebs, Rita MacDonald, Matt Miller, Elizabeth Riley, Julie Schenkelberg, Peter Soriano, Etty Yaniv, Rachel Mica Weiss

Site specific installation was completed at the Bemis Center of Contemporary Arts during a 2012 residency. Materials where gathered from Omaha home renivations and other locations.

Split Time 2012, 240"Lx 180"Wx 84"H materials: cut door, acrylic medium, plaster, carrera marble, tape, window panes, fiber-glass. 

The Cleveland Sculpture Center solo show 2014

Vestige summer 2022 is constructed of found housing materials and waste, touching on their rebirth. They are full of violet dyed plaster and concrete castings. These castings are from a library of imagery that I collect from my travels near and around the world. They represent the mystic in poetic form, goddess, Virgin Mary’s, lilies, daisies, griffins, dragons, domestic ware, they tell a poetic story piled in their archaeological form of tomb, relic or vestige.

Heirloom is constructed of found housing materials and waste, touching on their rebirth. They are full of violet dyed plaster and concrete castings. These castings are from a library of imagery that I collect from my travels near and around the world. They represent the mystic in poetic form, goddess, virgin marys, lilies, daisies, griffins, dragons, domestic ware, they tell a poetic story piled in their archaeological form of tomb, relic or vestige.

 Slavic Village, Abandoned Foreclosed Home Project, Rooms to Let, mixed media, 9' x 6' x 7', 2014.

Wicker couch, paper, fabric muslin, found wood, clothing, plaster

This was a vacant house in the Slavic Village area of Cleveland, Ohio. I am a native of Cleveland. The Slavic Village neighborhood is considered the "ground zero" area of home foreclosures. This project was meant to bring awareness to the home loan crisis and how it has leveled entire neighborhoods in this region. The project was called "Rooms To Let", 30 artists participated in over 5 homes. I chose to do an installation with all local materials. The people of the neighborhood, including the children from The Broadway School of Music, helped me gather a store materials form their homes to produce this work. I also gathered materials from a local sewing machine manufacturer. They saved old sheets, dishes, chairs and many other items, that afterwards where returned. The volunteers where proud to have the objects back knowing, that the intention of the project would linger in the objects in their homes.

Installation 2009

(

Moon series, embracing the waxing and waning of the moon. Linked to the mystical quality of my art practice, research and sculptural works.

(Eight of these works where previously acquired by Case Western Reserve University, Putnam Collection and The School of Engineering)

Materials: 22”x30” Gray rives BFK printmaking paper ragged edge with graphite, watercolor pencil, indigo ink and gold acrylic paint. These are metallic gold iridescent moons

Aqua Resin, plaster, paint

20 "x 3"x 32" and 20" x 3"x 44”

Cast Leaded Glass window made of aqua resin or gypsum and painted. Small Castings are plaster and hyrocal.

The piece is comprised of castings the artist has made from molds from abandoned buildings capturing their decorative architectural elements. Taking a record of bygone industrial years and forgotten splendor. It is akin to the long history of archaeology in Italy, but our abbreviated Rust Belt history. There are castings taken from historical cemeteries in Cleveland, abandoned buildings, carving reliefs from mansions from a bygone era, in addition to rose bush thorns, snail shells, crystals and vintage wedding lace, It is like a visual Victorian poem.

Other castings are specific to the artists family, dishware, spoons, teapots, various furniture and casting forms of the artists travel worldwide. I see this as an archaeological record creating a language in images and a record of past times, places, memories. The work is meant to appear otherworldly slipping its way by almost like an accumulated history in a shipwreck on the bottom of the lake.

17”x12” aqua resin, tray Venice, castings cemetery Utica NY, Detroit rusted metal, acrylic. Found cutlery

2010-2018