Recipient Information
Location
New Orleans, Louisiana
Year of Award
2023
Grant or Fellowship
Southern Prize and State Fellowship
Grant Amount
$5,000
Carlie Trosclair was raised in New Orleans as the daughter of an electrician, spending her formative years in historic residential properties at varying stages of construction and renovation. Reflectively, her work explores the genealogy of home by using latex as an architectural skin to create sculptural installations that highlight the structural and decorative shifts evolving over a building's lifespan.
Trosclair earned an MFA from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, and a BFA from Loyola University New Orleans. She is an alumna of the Community Arts Training Institute in St. Louis and the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA). Select artist residencies include: the Tides Institute & Museum of Art, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Joan Mitchell Center, Loghaven Artist Residency, Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists' Residency (MI), Vermont Studio Center, and The Luminary Center for the Arts.
Trosclair's work has been featured in Art in America, The New York Times, ArtFile Magazine, and Temporary Art Review, among others. She is the recipient of the Riverfront Times' Mastermind Award, the Creative Stimulus Award, Regional Arts Commission Artist Fellowship, and the Great Rivers Biennial Award.
Upcoming appointments for Trosclair include artist residencies at the McColl Center in North Carolina, the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico, and Sculpture Space in Utica, N.Y. This fall, she will have her first solo exhibition in New York at the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn.
Artist Statement
Approached through a lens of reordering and discovery, my work explores the liminal space between development and deconstruction, contemplating the living and transitional components of home. Growing up in New Orleans as the daughter of an electrician, I spent my formative years in historic residential properties at varying stages of construction and renovation. I found that even when abandoned, the presence of the body still lingers. Architectural components carry with them the layered histories of previous residents. These become the shells we leave behind: relics of habitation and home-making.
Using latex as an architectural skin, I both record and reimagine the genealogy of home and its relationship to the natural world. From the palimpsest of paint, disintegration of wood, or footprint of rust, these surfaces are connected in the ways they mark time. Echoes of the familiar are absorbed into the membrane of each latex body, crystallizing textures, and detritus of place. Paper-thin casts reshape the narrative of home as a sturdy secure space into one that is vulnerable and ephemeral. These ghostlike imprints mark an in-between space that is transient and ever changing both structurally and in our memory.