Nadine Schelbert

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

I am a Los Angeles–based artist working in sculpture and installation. I draw on the language of institutional spaces, using familiar materials to create situations where the impersonal begins to feel intimate and bodily. I work with standardized construction materials such as strut channel, acoustic tile, threaded rod, and industrial foam, alongside resin, rubber, plastic, metal, and ceramics. I am drawn to the anonymity of these standardized materials and to the relational logic built into many of their functions: they support, connect, contain, and carry. In the work, those functions remain legible even as they become less certain. A refrigerator rack can read as a mattress; a cast threaded rod can resemble tubing or veins; a deflated resin sphere can recall a preserved organ. Misrecognition, the moment when non-bodily materials produce bodily recognition, keeps the sculpture suspended between what something is and what it has begun to suggest. My installations develop through material exploration rather than a fixed narrative. Familiar elements drift from their assigned functions and form provisional conditions that imply use, absence, and dependence. I think of the sculptures less as discrete objects than as situations in which materials act on and rely on one another. Through these temporary arrangements, impersonal structures begin to carry an intimate pressure, making vulnerability felt without depicting the body directly.

Artwork