Julie Schenkelberg: Midlothian Chapel
Friday, January 17, 2025, 12:00 PM – Saturday, March 08, 2025, 4:00 PM
Exhibition Dates: Jan 17–Mar 8, 2025
Artist Lecture: Jan 17, 2025, 5pm, Fine Arts 015
Opening Reception: Jan 17, 2025, 6–8pm
The Grunwald Gallery presents "Midlothian Chapel," a room-sized sculptural installation by contemporary artist Julie Schenkelberg, the Indiana University Arts and Humanities Council’s 2024 Engaged Artist-in-Residence on the Bloomington campus.
Schenkelberg is an internationally exhibiting sculptor whose large-scale, mixed-media installations transform notions of domesticity and engage with the Rust Belt’s legacy of abandonment and decay. Starting with discarded furniture, dishware, textiles, and marble, the artist amalgamates found artifacts with concrete, resin, and construction materials. Working with the post-industrial materials of contemporary life, Schenkelberg alludes to an otherworldly experience that transcends the mundane. Her room-sized installations immerse the visitor in a physical and sensorial experience of the liminal and the unseen.
During her artist residency in Bloomington last spring, Schenkelberg explored some of the area’s traditions, communities, and collections centering spiritual mysticism. The artist's research led her to collections of esoterica at the Lilly Library, local yoga and meditation circles, to investigate Buddhism, and to create a print inspired by the solar eclipse. During her residency, she involved students in her process of excavating local lore and histories by casting molds of historical architectural elements, which will appear in the final installation of this sculpture. Viewers may discover plaster castings of the limestone sculptures that adorn Maxwell Hall -- one of the oldest buildings on the Bloomington campus -- including mystical symbols such as griffins and dragons.
Also in the spring, Schenkelberg pursued her research in Scotland to experience the Rosslyn Chapel (1456), a landmark containing sacred symbols from a mix of spiritual and religious belief systems. Her encounter with the chapel, located outside of Edinburgh in the county of Midlothian, Scotland, has furthered her interest in the sacred and how it inserts into our lives across time and cultures. The chapel inspired the name of Schenkelberg's installation at the Grunwald.
"Midlothian Chapel" is an amalgamation of two installations. In its first incarnation, the installation was the chapel "Aurora," created for the outdoor sculpture park Franconia in Shafer, Minnesota in 2021. The artist with a crew excavated the site-specific work that had spent three years outdoors, to serve as the foundation of the installation at the Grunwald. The new installation combines the found histories of the materials from Minnesota -- steel, wood, found material, and soil weathered over three winters -- with items found in Bloomington, including barn wood, tree clippings, soil, and limestone. In fusing worlds across time and materials, the artist creates an entirely new universe in "Midlothian Chapel."
Schenkelberg envisions "Midlothian Chapel" both as a space in which to engage with contemplation of the sacred feminine and with the darkness and power of our industrial history, and as a portal. The structures are populated with goddesses from diverse faith traditions to totems originating from the artist's own personal experience, evincing reverence for family history and domestic life. The installation combines castings of personal objects, including those collected from cemeteries and domestic spaces, with those cast from architectural details carved from locally quarried limestone. From flowers, scrolls, and dragons to everyday objects, the cast relics will be encased in a glass sanctuary for contemplation as the visitor moves through the chapel. In the chapel, the relics are juxtaposed with artifacts from the industrial history of the Rust Belt, such as twisted metal, crushed wire forms, and rocks from various scrap yards in Detroit, Cleveland, and Bloomington.