the shape of memory | Carlie Trosclair
2024 Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Fellow
May 24, 2025 – September 7, 2025

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.

Read the full essay by Carol S. Eliel

Join us for an Artist Dialogue with Carlie Trosclair + Heather Bird Harris on May 25

About the artist

Carlie Trosclair (b. New Orleans, LA) is a sculptor and installation artist who uses latex to record and reimagine the genealogy of home and its relationship to the natural world. Trosclair spent her formative years in historic residential properties at varying stages of construction and renovation. Reflectively her work contemplates the living and transitional components of home–both structurally and in our memory. Trosclair earned an M.F.A from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, a B.F.A from Loyola University New Orleans, and is an alumni of the Community Arts Training Institute in St. Louis. Select artist residencies include: La Napoule Art Foundation (FR), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (NE), Loghaven Artist Residency (TN), McColl Center (NC), Joan Mitchell Center (LA), Sculpture Space (NY), Tides Institute & Museum of Art (ME), and the Santa Fe Art Institute Changing Climate Residency (NM). Trosclair’s work has been featured in Art in America, The New York Times, BURNAWAY Magazine, and Temporary Art Review, among others. She has exhibited at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum, Ogden Museum, Bradbury Art Museum, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, and the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum of Art. Additionally, Trosclair has mounted solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, DeLand Museum of Art, Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles, NARS Foundation Brooklyn, NY and Project Row Houses Houston, TX. Most recently Trosclair was selected as the South Arts Louisiana State Fellow for Visual Arts and awarded the 2024 Ellis-Beauregard Fellowship for the Visual Arts.

Carol S. Eliel is Senior Curator Emerita of Modern Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where she worked from 1984 through 2023. She organized numerous exhibitions with catalogues including Light Space Surface (2021); Betye Saar: Call and Response (2019); Moholy-Nagy: Future Present (co-organized, 2016); David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy (2011); and L'Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris (2001) among many others. Eliel was also actively involved in building LACMA’s permanent collection, with acquisitions by Jeffrey Gibson, Suzanne Jackson, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Lee Krasner, Annette Messager, László Moholy-Nagy, Senga Nengudi, Alice Rahon, Alison Saar, Betye Saar, and numerous others. She has lectured across the US, written on a wide variety of subjects from 18th-century French painting to contemporary art, and served as president of the American Association of Museum Curators (2011-13). She currently serves on the board of the Claire Falkenstein Foundation and chairs the Modern and Contemporary Art vetting committee for TEFAF. Named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, she received her BA from Yale University and her MA and PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

CMCA is grateful to the Ellis Beauregard Foundation for its generous support for this exhibition and publication.