Architectural Skins

NEW ORLEANS ARTIST CARLIE TROSCLAIR’S INVESTIGATION OF THE SPACES IN WHICH WE DWELL

By Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

On an afternoon in the fall of h2021, New Orleans artist Carlie Trosclair walked out into Cobscook Bay, shuffling her waders through the shallow sludge at low tide, cursing—dragging a full-scale latex casting of a porch behind her. The water would rise again, as high as twenty-four feet, by the afternoon.

Upon Trosclair’s arrival in Eastport, Maine—where she would complete an eight-week residency with the Tides Institute and Museum of Art—the shift of the bay’s remarkable tides had instantly struck her. “How do y’all not flood?” she wondered, haunted by images of waterlogged houses in Pointe-au-Chien in the wake of Hurricane Ida, a disaster cleanup she’d only just finished lending her hand to a few weeks prior.

She soon learned that Eastport’s waterfront structures are built with recesses beneath the buildings, which accept the tide—taking the water in, then allowing it to flow back out. “I was just like, ‘Oh my God, that is a real-life example of what it looks like to work with nature, within the architecture,’” she said.

Dragging her most recent sculpture into the Bay, her body recalled the exhaustive labor of rebuilding in that post-hurricane haze. She set the casting up against the remnants of an old pier, and she waited, watching as it ever-so-slowly buckled beneath the rising waters. “Of course, the image of this shell of space, engulfed in water over time— you know, of course subconsciously there is a layer of that disaster there.”

Trosclair often speaks of her work in terms of layers, conceptually and materially folding in on itself, crinkling here and stretching there, ever peeling away, posed to unveil another layer, another idea. Recent years, shaped by a 2019 return to her hometown of New Orleans, have brought her to dissect influences deeply buried: how the city, and its architectural fragility, have innately shaped her journey as an artist—and particularly as an artist so preoccupied with the philosophy of structure, and its eventual ruin. Of course, water—and its capacity for destruction—is an indelible part of that story. And for Trosclair, who was a nineteen-year-old student at Loyola in 2005, so is Katrina.

“I feel like I didn’t have a chance to process all of it.” She recalls being miles away from home, evacuated, sitting with her dad and trying to navigate an early version of Google Maps to find their house, to see if the roof was still there.

Almost a decade and a half later— most of which Trosclair had spent living away from New Orleans—this memory arose when she arrived in the city for a five-month residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in the Tremé in 2019.

“You know how you can go onto Google Maps and look at a home, and go back in time? I spent probably weeks walking through that neighborhood back in 2007,” she said. “And I felt these layers of time folding in on themselves. It was almost like I created this space where I mentally jumped back . . . It was really kind of overwhelming. It was the first time that I thought about the place that I was from, and the place that I grew up, in this lens of what had happened architecturally—which of course is a stand-in for what happened to the people.”

Despite this, a retrospective look at Trosclair’s body of work even prior to her Joan Mitchell residency reverberates with themes of infrastructural legacy, decay, and rebirth. After completing her MFA at Missouri’s Washington University in 2010, she remained in St. Louis, embarking on explorations of the city’s abandoned homes, which fold themselves

This exploration of dwellings and habitation, exposure to the elements and abandonment, and the human body’s intimate relationships with space sustained Trosclair’s artistic practice for over a decade—culminating in ever-evolving studies presented as site-specific sculptural installations staged all across the country, but often within St. Louis’s abandoned buildings themselves, where she carved lacework designs into crumbling wallpaper and peeled back plaster just so, to reveal hints of the bricks laid behind it.

“The term ‘architectural skin,’ was a part of my work really early on,” she said.

In recent years, this concept has manifested more literally in Trosclair’s latex work, through which she creates phantom-like sculptural casts of everything from doorknobs to entire front porches. It started materially, in a search for something that would physically embody this idea of skin while also being tactile and malleable enough to hold its own form.

“Then, conceptually, it folded in really beautifully,” she said. A natural material traditionally used in architectural restoration work, latex is usually used as the intermediary to create a plaster cast. Trosclair turns this method upside down, using the latex instead as a sort of shedded shell—“like cicadas, or snakeskin”.

“Latex holds this temporary moment of a surface or structure, and it kind of crystallizes that moment, not only in the imprint of what is physically present, but also by transferring actual particles. It kind of embeds that moment.”

Her work these days is focused on pushing latex as a material as far as she can, carrying the concept to ever new, though always contiguous, places. For a 2022 installation, she honed in on concepts of reflection, and on the relationships between past and present: a latex cast of a ceiling fan posed immaculately from its place above, doubled just beneath by a sagging, limp residual version of itself. The idea came to Trosclair while walking to her car, wearing galoshes, in New Orleans—noticing the rippled, broken reflections of the shotgun houses in the floodwaters after a short burst of rainfall. The installation was included in her exhibition as part of Houston’s Project Row Houses Southern Survey Biennial in 2022–2023, along with within|between, for which she cast the entire interior of a room, then placed it inside the room—allowing viewers to walk in between the real wall and the ghost wall. “It’s kind of like this imprint, or imaginative kind of past or something—or future,” she said. This installation will be exhibited again at the Ohr O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi from August 17–December 13 as part of the Southern Arts exhibition of its State Fellows for the Visual Arts, before touring across the region in 2024.

In the meantime, Trosclair is casting cypress knees. The concept started, as it so often does, with her thoughts on layers, and time, and water—and more recently, breath. “I’ve been thinking a lot about breath when it comes to the body, a lot about inhale and exhale,” she said. “And I didn’t even know when I started casting these, but there is a theory that cypress knees pop up out of the water to get air back down to the roots. An aeration system. Breath. It’s almost like everything just subconsciously cycles back to itself.”• carlietrosclair.com