Rockland, Maine
Center for Maine Contemporary Art
Carlie Trosclair, the 2024 recipient of the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation’s Visual Arts Fellowship, perceives nature as all-encompassing and regenerative, offering a lens through which to counteract our fears of annihilation and feel connected to each other. In “the shape of memory,” an artist-curated retrospective of shadow worlds fabricated in latex (on view through September 14, 2025), she unveils a transitional moment in which natural forms and interventions begin to infiltrate her uncanny architectural environments.
Trosclair quit her native New Orleans—forever, she thought—following college, soon after Hurricane Katrina had devastated the Gulf Coast and uprooted her family in 2005. In her 30s, she decided to move back and explore her sense of personal loss. She began painting latex “skins” on walls, domestic interiors, and trees in 2017. Peeled in a single piece and flipped inside out, the latex, coated with a patina of dirt, paint flakes, fibers, and bark, embodies a memory of its original in almost photographic detail. Placing the viewer at a literal remove from the things being referenced, Trosclair’s work challenges our illusions of our permanent rootedness in the things we hold most dear. She draws attention to the tragedy and absurdity of a world in which our families, possessions, and homes are merely transient.
Chrysalis: Reflections on the Interstitial (2019), a freestanding canopy with filigreed archways and pillars trailing onto the floor, glows off-center in the dim, elongated white-box gallery, anchoring five other latex pieces that hover on the periphery. Its drooping ivory membrane replicates the doorways, posts, piercings, and gingerbread panels that form the front porch of a shotgun house (a historic style common to New Orleans and much of the American South). This permeable interface between domestic space and the outer world also functions as the lungs of the dwelling, sweeping cooler air into the steaming interior and out the back door.
Accepting that latex is a “living” material, vulnerable to deterioration from light, aging, and its own weight, Trosclair mends pieces like Chrysalis to “extend the timeline” of the work. Trees and waterways offer up new surfaces, materials, and the potential for transformative actions, such as embellishing the overlay of a tree stump with embroidery floss to reference “lichen or mold…like new growth” (Woodland Terrains II, 2022).
Spread on the wall opposite, like a giant monarch butterfly sheltering under a shallow roof, Understory (2024) smolders in a fiery gradient of burnt oranges veined with dusty brown. Brushed on and then lifted from the rubble wall of an old North Carolina church, the latex has become gritty and heavy with pigments shed by the rough stones and rusty, mortared joints. It even captures the colonizing vine that meanders over the irregular grooves and binds the built wall to natural forces of growth and decay.
The hallucinatory Rootrise (2025) looms out of the shadowed end of the gallery like a golden stage set streaked with soot. Lifted from an antebellum staircase, a pair of balustrades and dentilated panels divide and cascade down from the ceiling in classical splendor. Carved newel posts and ragged spindles fan sideways like giant wings sprouting roots and tentacles that feather off toward the sky. The inconclusive passageway, suspended in its arrested decomposition, both surprises and dismays.
Finding a fallen oak lying in a streambed with its roots exposed brought back Trosclair’s post-Katrina memories of houses washed away by the waves, flotsam and furniture flung into the trees. She elected to cast the entire root structure complete with engrafted dirt and stones in Echoes beneath (2025). Layers of latex served as a glue for intertwining the shapes of inverted antique dining chairs with the “roots.” Engaging with such vital, emotion-laden memories opens a door to poignant insights—and new work. As Trosclair says, “I’m making formal, but also conceptual transitions between the roots and wooden objects that are in the domestic space. [The trees are] absorbing us—the remnants of our lives, what we leave behind.”
