Exhibition Announcement: the shape of memory | Carlie Trosclair
Summer Exhibition at Center for Maine Contemporary Art
Exhibition dates: May 24 to September 7, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 24, 3-5pm
Artist Dialogue with Carlie Trosclair + Heather Bird Harris: Sunday, May 25, 2-3pm
Rockland, ME—The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) is pleased to announce the exhibition the shape of memory by Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Fellow, Carlie Trosclair. This exhibition is on view from May 24 with an opening reception from 3-5pm, until September 7, 2025. There will be an artist dialogue on May 25 from 2-3pm with Carlie Trosclair in conversation with artist and educator Heather Bird Harris.
Metaphor is essential to Carlie Trosclair’s work: architecture as body, architectural surface as skin, latex as skin, the domestic space as a vessel of memory and past lives. The resulting sculptures and installations explore the vulnerability and ephemerality of home, as both a physical space and a concept. The poetic takes on a visceral existence in Trosclair’s ghostly sculptures—created by painting liquid latex onto man-made and natural surfaces, allowing it to dry, and then peeling it away. The milky liquid (tapped from rubber trees), applied in multiple layers, dries to a translucent amber. At times, the latex picks up color from the original surface; in other works, the artist adds natural pigment to suggest the passage of time.
Trosclair, the daughter of an electrician, recalls spending her childhood in historic New Orleans residential properties at varying stages of construction and renovation. These memories go hand in hand with the impacts of the Gulf Coast climate, where one is perpetually subjected to evacuation and uncertain return. The repeated act of leaving home and belongings behind led Trosclair to consider closely the haptics of memory and the psychology of place. In recent work, Trosclair expands the notion of regenerative cycles and home beyond the built environment, exploring a symbiotic relationship with the broader landscape.
the shape of memory reflects both the universal and specific aspects of Troslair’s practice, and evokes the dual—and often dueling—aspects of our world: culture (the man-made) and nature. Chrysalis: Reflections on the Interstitial (2019) is a double porch cast from a historic shotgun house in New Orleans. A design reflective of its tropical climate, the traditional shotgun house was made to receive and expel air; for Trosclair, the idea of home as a breathing body. Rootrise (2025) is a cascading banister hung from the ceiling, its spindles transitioning in form and color from architecture into outgrowing vines and tree branches. The evocative roots in Echoes beneath (2025) morph into remnants of furniture and cast-iron railing, latex ghosts of man-made household and building fragments. Trosclair is an alchemist in all her work, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, decay and destruction into ghostly and fantastical creations.
Carlie Trosclair lives in New Orleans. She had an artist’s residency at the Tides Institute & Museum of Art in Eastport, Maine in 2021, and is the recipient of the 2023 Visual Arts Award of the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, a national award given by the Rockland-based foundation.
Carol S. Eliel, Senior Curator Emerita of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) wrote the essay in the exhibition brochure, Carlie Trosclair: Ephemeral Ghosts. The foregoing text was extracted from Eliel’s essay, edited and modified by the artist and CMCA.
CMCA is grateful to the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation for its generous support for this exhibition and publication.
