Just Passing Through

A latex cast of shingles hangs from the ceiling in Carlie Trosclair’s studio. Photo: Agata Storer

The studio of Fine Arts Work Center visual art fellow Carlie Trosclair is filled with shell fragments and fluke prints, cyanotypes and kelp, synthetic membranes and crustaceous curiosities. Airy structures sprawled across tables and suspended from the ceiling resist enclosure, allowing spectral entities to take up residence.

For over a decade, Trosclair has been creating “architectural skins,” painting latex onto the exteriors and interiors of buildings, then peeling the latex off in a single sheet and flipping it inside out — a process she arrived at after her family was temporarily displaced from her native New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“It feels like what I’m doing is the antithesis of monument, which feels so permanent and fixed and therefore inaccurate — because narrative changes, perspective changes, the lens we look through, both culturally and individually, changes,” says Trosclair. “Even memory changes.”

Monument-building is a grasp at stability. “In Western culture, we want things to be permanent,” she observes. “We’re often trying to get back to a certain time or build things that will last.” Through her art, a synthesis of sculpture, installation, and printmaking, she asks: “How can we be more adaptable and fluid?”

Trosclair’s work, in her eyes, is more akin to a poem or a prayer — which she sees as two sides of the same coin. The repetitive act of painting latex onto structures in varying states of decay and then peeling it away, taking with it flecks of paint or dirt or other traces, creates an intimacy between architecture and artist. “A poem is not a monument — it holds ideas in a more porous way, and every time you revisit it, it reveals something else,” she says. “It’s a devotion to a thing, not an attempt to freeze it.” Her architectural skins inhabit the same ambiguous realm, “shifting, relational, evolving as I evolve.”