Julie Schenkelberg

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. She now lives in Cleveland.  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.

Image Information: Transmigration, house dissection and relocation (wood, fabric, paint), 2016