76″ x 300″ x 192″

Repurposed found wood, plaster, concrete, pigment, Franconia limestone, steel, scrap metal, local stone, crushed glass, twine, paint and fabric

Julie Schenkelberg grew up in the post-industrial landscape of Cleveland, Ohio. Her mixed-media installations start with furniture, dishware, textiles, and natural found materials combined with concrete 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 passing civilizations and urban decay, but also the uncanny juxtapositions of fragile substances such as cloth, concrete casted family heirlooms, with industrial materials such as rusty metal, heavy concrete, and tool-made marks. Her work is greatly influenced by her regional, international travel and her eighteen years of professional experience of working in the theater as a scenic painter. AURORA- is a sarcophagus sacred space that the viewer can wander through and contemplate where this place is or was, entwined in the nature at Franconia.

She is represented by Asya Geisberg Gallery, in Manhattan, NY. Her large-scale installations have been displayed in solo exhibitions at the Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh, PA, The Detroit-Volterra Foundation, Italy, The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH, the Beeler Gallery, OH, Plug Projects, MO, and UNTITLED Miami Beach, FL., She has been exhibited at the Museum of Art and Design in New York. She won the 2014 ArtPrize Installation Juried Award 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, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE, Art Omi, Ghent, NY, Projekstom Normanns, Norway, Pont Aven Contemporary, Pont Aven, France, , Arte Ventura, Aracena, Spain, SiTE:LAB, Grand Rapids, and Red Bull Arts, Detroit, MI