Julie Schenkelberg
Shadow Bath
April 4 - May 10, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, April 4, 5-7 pm
Matéria is pleased to present Julie Schenkelberg’s solo exhibition Shadow Bath, including twenty new wall sculptures, a free-standing sculpture, drawings, and a large site-specific installation.
In her work, Schenkelberg seeks for common connection through place, across time, spirituality, and transformation. Often working with installation and mixed-media sculpture, Schenkelberg’s work transmutes notions of domesticity, femininity, and engages with the American Rust Belt's legacy of abandonment and decay. Her practice also includes research of sacred illuminated texts, mysticism, and the spiritual from various cultures. Schenkelberg’s installations seek to find a universal sacred. Using discarded industrial materials and once revered domestic objects, she creates new familiar places channeling a muted feminine perspective, unearthing stories, and regenerating lost beauty.
Schenkelberg constructs her installations with found materials from scrap yards, dumpsters, construction sites, estate sales and family members. She often cuts invasively into buildings and furniture, and makes castings of objects, altering their states in order to release their forgotten stories and allow their energy to be transformed in unexpected combinations.
In Shadow Bath, Schenkelberg explores the shadow side of our existence, acknowledging that Light cannot be found without the shadow. Through the arrangement of symbols such as a rose wreath, daisies, a pointing hand, the artist creates a code language that speaks of the transiency of this physical moment and the inevitable complementary aspects of life and death.
Shadow Bath’s site installation Shadow Once Was (2025) 108 x 108 x 126 inches, incorporates discarded objects specific to the gallery’s site, the Detroit neighborhood of Core City. There are found boards from loved homes meant for demolition, paying homage to the beauty and the lost life, a bygone domestic time. Found metal intertwined with new intention creating a “forest” of wonder among the materials. There is a pure beauty of these materials, a revered sadness but also a renewed hope in the recombining of the artist’s poetic vision.
In Shadow Bath, Julie Schenkelberg brings the shadow out to understand it, not shying away from it, but creating a sacred altar to honor it and transmute it. The wall sculptural works, cast venetian tray frames, are like mirrors reflecting back to the viewer a part of them and an unknown beauty in the darkness. Some of the work is enveloped in green in addition to black, like a deep ocean wave, moving and ever mysterious, beautiful clam if left to be appreciated.
As in the artist’s previous installations, Shadow Bath’s main installation shows the mark of time, embodied energy of the previous life of the found material, and now infused with the artist’s own energy, as she uses them as artistic materials, creating a new story of re-embrace, transition into a new phase, and a healing of the past.