Julie Schenkelberg “Embodied Energies”

Asya Geisberg Gallery

poster for Julie Schenkelberg “Embodied Energies”

This event has ended.

Asya Geisberg Gallery presents “Embodied Energies”, the third solo exhibition of installation artist Julie Schenkelberg. Expanding on her language of architectural decay, historical detritus, and domestic destruction, Schenkelberg will create a site-specific installation that will take over the gallery, as well as a series of smaller wall and floor works echoing elements of the larger work. The installation will traverse the polygon of the gallery walls, creating a variety of experiences for the viewer - encountering the expansive Rabelaisian work from the street, discovering the “back” or underside, exploring intimate nooks created by claustrophobic canopies, and stumbling on rubble piles. The winner of the ArtPrize Installation Juried award for her massive installation “Symptomatic Constant: Shipwreck in the Midwest”, Schenkelberg has spent ten weeks working on the AGG installation.

Schenkelberg’s ambitious oeuvre has strong antecedents in ‘70s artists such as Louise Nevelson, Gordon Matta Clark, and Louise Bourgeois. Her work seamlessly intersects the poignant interaction of material of contemporary artists like Jessica Jackson Hutchins with artists such as David Altmejd and Jason Rhoades who invent their own worlds, identifiable across media. Schenkelberg’s unique point of view emanates from her immersion in Rust Belt decay, via material sourced from sidewalks and scrap heaps created by industrial demise. Construction and domestic materials such as wooden furniture, marble, silk, and dishware suggest the decaying glamour of a gloried era. Plaster, cement, and resin encases or spills out through slats, and sawed cuts and drilled holes overtake and defy solidity. While wistful in its references of discarded and abandoned wreckage, Schenkelberg’s work, with its minutely crafted details and epic scope, nonetheless gives hope of rebirth for cities such as Detroit, Pittsburgh, and her native Cleveland. The cinders and ashes of broken homes and upturned lives become not just an epitaph for economic downturn but a deeply aesthetic excavation and reinvention.

Julie Schenkelberg received a BA in art history at the College of Wooster, OH, and an MFA at the School of Visual Arts, NY. Her large-scale installations have been displayed in solo exhibitions at The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, and most recently at the Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh. Schenkelberg won the 2014 ArtPrize Installation Juried Award with her installation in the lobby of the disused Art Deco Morton Hotel. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at 601 Artspace, New York, Storefront Ten Eyck, Brooklyn, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, and Station Independent, New York. Press includes Artforum, Bloomberg, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Art F City, The Huffington Post, Beautiful Decay and Ground Magazine. She has received two National Endowment for the Arts Grants, a Harpo Foundation Grant, and was awarded a residency at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha. Schenkelberg will premiere a new installation with curatorial group SiTE:LAB at the UNTITLED Miami art fair this December.

[Image: Julie Schenkelberg “The Color of Temperance” (2015) Reclaimed lath, wood, marble, iron, paper, vintage furniture, dishware, figurines, natural debris, crushed reclaimed metal, light fixtures, wallpaper, plaster. Image courtesy of the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA. Photographer: Tom Little.]

Media

Schedule

from September 10, 2015 to October 24, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-09-10 from 18:00 to 20:30

  • Facebook

    Reviews

    All content on this site is © their respective owner(s).
    New York Art Beat (2008) - About - Contact - Privacy - Terms of Use