Buenos Aires-based Jessica Trosman began her career in fashion design, launching the brand Trosmanchurba with Martín Churba in 1997 and her eponymous brand in 2002. Her fashion practice took her around the world, especially Japan, and work in her textile laboratory generated prestigious collaborations with haute couture houses such as Chanel and Rick Owens. When she began her career as an artist in 2019, Trosman channeled this expertise into the creation of sculptures that subject fabric and plastic to dramatic material and volumetric transformations, rendering forms that are frozen, abstracted, and free of the body, though almost always in conversation with it.
María Carolina Baulo: What leads a fashion designer with an international career to go from soft fabrics that move with the body to rigid and static sculptural objects?
Jessica Trosman: My identity in the cultural sphere is marked by my extensive career in the clothing industry. In 2019, after several experiences on common ground with the contemporary art world, I made a real-life step and began to think of myself as a sculptor through a specific practice. That is to say, not only did I make a formal and professional decision, but also a vocational and ethical transformation that crystallized in a path full of continuities and ruptures with my previous life.
It is not possible for me to separate the artist from the designer, not only because this identity persists in public memory, but also because the language of my sculptural work and the subjective processes involved in its making are tributaries of that experience. For example, the works in “Season” (2022), my first solo exhibition, held at the Gachi Prieto gallery in Buenos Aires, show a continuing relationship with the world of fashion. I do not think it is possible, however, to reduce this decision to a simple change in the system of appreciation, consumption, and circulation of my work. This new environment implies transcending the industrial limits of merchandise and investigating the sensitive effects of materials, the vital processes of objects, experimenting with an alternative type of communication to that which is maintained with the client, with the brand, and with the spaces that give it visibility. This new life is no longer regulated by the more or less flexible imperative of imposing a form on a body; instead, it allows a shift toward the formless, the open, and the unfinished.
MCB: Some of your favorite materials include injected and foamed plastic, fabric, PVC, foil, and photographic prints. How do these materials work within your creative process?
JT: I leave the materials open to the logic of expansion, torsion, and explosion. Searching for textile innovations, working in latex, and creating textures are part of an unlimited, alchemical repertoire; the final product is less a finished thing than the emotional vestige of the objective and subjective transformations of development. In this sense, I always start from protocols born in the laboratory into which my workshop was transformed, and I let the pieces surrender to distortion and deflection as they advance through space, becoming volumes. They interact with bases and new materials, on diverse scales, with exhibition dynamics that are strange to them. The choice of fabrics, their brightness and color, their subjection to controlled temperatures, and the creation of dysfunctional molds are accompanied by an applied, disciplined, demanding attention that allows me to achieve unexpected morphological endings. From them, I acquire a new state of happiness. I build new knots to untie. Between craftsmanship and industrial methods, my sculptures exorcise and destroy memories, fears, and sensations.
MCB: Sense of dimension (2019) inaugurates this passage from clothing to sculpture. What can you tell us about it?
JT: Sense of dimension puts the emphasis on the change of dimension. It was made in fragments and pieces and assembled like a patchwork on the floor, where not only the notion of the body as a paradigm of representation disappeared, but also verticality in the displayable and commercial form of the model. The new dimension also indicates a change in language, an intensification of constructive elements of textiles that cease to be accessories and ornament and now occupy the foreground. Thus, the fold, the volute, the volume, the fall cease to be formal units in a language of surfaces and become spatial artifacts that make the work an environmental and enveloping piece.
MCB: El abrazo (The embrace, 2020), which takes the work into a larger-than-human scale for the first time, is located outside. You used materials that can withstand the vicissitudes of time and undertook extensive formal research to create textures that emulate fabric. How did you interpret the gesture that gives the work its name?
JT: El abrazo is part of a persistent inquiry into the formal, material, and emotional motif of the hug, sometimes thought of as a device of capture, immobilization, and suffocation, but other times as a relational, emotional, and human experience. The work forced me to develop a material system capable of withstanding the elements and, at the same time, of preserving the gestures of the fabric. This exploration led to working with aluminum, iron, lacquer, and concrete to compose the two large-scale figures in the intimate moment of the gesture. It’s a public piece, installed in the Patagonian region of Argentina, in the forest at the foot of the mountain. It turns to friction, the encounter of forms, and the expressive possibility of sculpture as a sentimental diagram. The colors (green and brown) seek to integrate with the environment, but at the same time they are cut out from it, since I wanted to show the constructed and artificial nature of the work.
MCB: Hard Times (2020), Viewer (2020), and Dark Dreams (2021) are full of eroticism. Clothing and fashion carry enormous power—partly to seduce—but through your symbolic use of color and the subtle suggestion of the objects that the pieces represent, you also speak of a power related to pain, cruelty, and violence.
JT: Hard Times participates in the sadomasochistic universe, which continues in Dark Dreams and Viewer. It strongly summons one of the dominatrix’s signature fetishes—the high-heeled shoe—but it also reveals contemporary violence. The work was created in the context of the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement and the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020. It recalls official brutality by condensing the sensation of suffocation and the search for escape.
Viewer belongs to a group of small-scale works exploring the subjection of matter, erotic practices, and formal experiments, working around elements such as the hood and the bag as means of torture and asphyxiation. At the same time, formally, it proposes an indirect figurative suggestion. What lies suffocated in the bag, trapped in the black hood? A head, a rabbit, another creature? There is what the Germans call a Vexierbild—an image with a secret or graphic riddle, a pictogram from which a latent idea can be separated from manifest content. This is how tension is transferred to the viewer, placed in the erotic and sensitive place of the voyeur.
Dark Dreams was made by inflating fabric and injecting plastic, activating two elements that persist in my practice—a wooden material support, specifically designed for the piece, and a skin of monochrome black that evokes leather as a raw material. The support becomes a tool that subjects the matter to a certain torsion. In this sense, the piece creates a bondage microworld, in which the base and the sculptural object are mixed in a game of hanging and support, of violence and trust, of mercy and cruelty.
MCB: Headless Time, Secrets of Hiding, Mixed Matters, At the border, and Air Between your legs (all 2021) allow us to delve deeper into your modus operandi.
JT: These five pieces, exhibited as a unitary installation but conceived autonomously, make up a small compendium of works that reveal certain constants and variants in my practice. The use of iron and wooden supports, each composed specifically in different heights and morphologies, seems to furnish the space with benches, pots, tables, stools, each of them interacting with pieces in which fabrics, metals, and plastics belie any functional, ornamental, or narrative use. The series also plays with various colors and textures that are combined, then folded, crushed, and inflated to varying degrees, opening to full, smooth, and striated surfaces in conjunction with graphic areas of photographic prints. Finally, in a perceptual and sensory game of closeness and distance, between the optical and the haptic, the pieces appear as objects that go from soft to solid. They are trapped on their bases but at the same time captured in a situation of slipping away or emancipating themselves from their place.
MCB: In Compromised and Guardian (both 2021), you focus on the world of objects but still allude to the human sphere through the emotions that they awaken, the symbolic capital locked in the titles. In these cases, the figure of the “knot” seems to be crucial.
JT: Compromised evokes those situations in which something is put at risk or has been “committed” to. However, what is committed is not something that comes from the outside, but rather an inner call that materializes in a knot, a zone of congestion that, to unblock, must first be exposed, compromised. This work is part of a series of small objects that stage part of my formal and sentimental repertoire—the knot as the epitome of a situation of conflict, of a struggle between desire and will, between the friction of parts and the sliding surface of materials. The knot is like a relic that reminds me of the birth of a new life and that necessarily coincides with the birth of a new form. Guardian seeks to ensure protection, to put into practice, to produce a magical effect—what anthropologists call the apotropaic effect: a catharsis, a purge.
MCB: You mentioned “Season,” your first solo show. Could you describe some of the featured works?
JT: “Season” featured a set of works that operate as a critical homage to my past life in fashion design, to its rhythm and dynamics—a dehumanized parade in which the models are volumes arranged in space before a stage of empty chairs. The series reveals not only this object-dimension that bodies acquire as supports, but also a whole semantic range of the affects that surround the industry: anxiety, speed, exhaustion. Maratónica (2022), for example, highlights the centrality of those subordinate agents who, behind the scenes, sustain the event. It not only explores the visible effect of the materials (their shine, polish, apparent splendor), but also reflects on the ruined work and the transience of the show. Alérgica (2022), on the other hand, takes the hypothetical place of maximum visibility, the center of attention. This model/object, made through sewing, inflation, and foliation, proposes a counter scene: in confrontation with the body as a desired figure, Alérgica is an antibody. The pose is defensive—hiding the face, letting the body suck in the face, self-swallowing. In the tradition of Tarsila do Amaral’s Abaporu, the piece denies the element of identification par excellence, facial features, which leaves the figure levitating on the edge of the human, in the realm of anomaly.
Bronceada (Tanned, 2022) was made with a three-layer aluminum sheet, painted on the inside and outside. It is distinguished from the rest by the fact that it uses color as its main construction element. Bronze evokes the idea of public memory and consecration, as well as the low and rustic. In this piece, I see burnout. Insegura (2022), a mobile at the center of a field of forces, is held suspended in space, printed with the traces of past forces. Made of cloth sewn on the floor, inflated on the mold of the body, and painted in gradients of different colors with a blowtorch, it exhibits the physical weight of the body, as if it were a pillow that keeps the memory of the arms that held it.
I thought of Exigida (Demanded, 2022), the only seated piece, in the manner of Francis Bacon’s paintings, as a self-portrait of the artist. In this state, the body opens up to less normative and glamorous powers, allowing itself to be crossed by destructive tensions—collapsing, melting, as if the complex material irremediably enters a zone of disintegration once it settles. Lánguida (Languid, 2022) is behind-the-scenes. Oblivious to the climax of the parade, it produces the off-screen, liminal space of the after-show, which gives it the sensation of a melancholic languor. What has been done seems to have been rendered meaningless, and only a body remains, which, though exhausted, is still attentive.
MCB: Legal (2022) was the only wall-bound piece in the show. How does it address the importance of space in your work?
JT: Legal, painted by hand with a blowtorch and gradient, airbrushed colors, leaned against the wall. It is the most pictorial of the series. This does not imply a sacrifice of spatiality and volume, however, since in addition to the play between form and deformation, between movement and stillness, it exposes a turgid member that detaches from the body of the piece to reach the ground. It is no coincidence that the most eloquently phallic object in the series is located at the end of the route.
MCB: In 2023, you presented “Sense of Self,” a solo exhibition at Thomas Redrado Art in Miami. Could you talk about some of its central pieces, for example, Tiro Loco (2023)?
JT: Tiro Loco, named for a gastronomic establishment near my studio, is part of a group of works exploring the architectural environment of the city. It is like a map of forces, a body exploded by the experience of shock, losing one’s mind. With Tiro Loco, I allowed myself to think about other community ties, dismantling the hegemonic logic of the corporeal and opening a new zone of contact.
Photo: Claudia Larios
MCB: Higgs, Warnes, and Catástrofe (all 2023) explore the universe of science. We move from human anatomy and emotions to the environment, nature, and the forces of the universe.
JT: Higgs honors the nuclear physicist and the idea that destruction can be a mode of construction. In this sense, the pop and the explosion are experimental access routes to the elementary particle, to the primary form, a way of returning to the beginning. Warnes, which is made of two parts that fit into a single piece, returns to a theme and a dynamic that interests me—the way in which two parts tend to get closer but at the same time remain at a minimum, almost tangential distance. The result is a multitude of intertwined shapes, reminiscent of a chain crash. Catástrofe is no longer just textiles, but also metal, carpentry, steel cables, and synthetic ropes that pull and suspend its objects. A catastrophe is something that loses its original form and can no longer regain it. A catastrophic event is a change in shape that is irreversible. The piece synthesizes my work with materials with the construction of a new language in which the constitutive unity of the human body is lost, in which objects are transformed into a play of forces, of gravities, of pieces that rub against each other, in the form of hanging and suffocation. Calculation and expression coexist, bringing all the emotions into play.