New Orleans artist Carlie Trosclair cast roots, cypress knees, and tree stumps along with bits of architecture, home decor, and fabric from days bygone for her exhibition allowed our edges to merge at Sibyl Gallery. The term cast has dual meanings here, as her works are assembled in a miseen-scène throughout the gallery, like performers in a theater. Trosclair looks for philosophical and phenomenological similarities between her subjects, inviting us to perceive the vulnerability of both natural and man-made worlds.
Using a latex of pale cream to create molds with pigment for narrative effect, Trosclair also allows for bits of bark, dirt, and brick to enter the casts, merging the real and imagined. Works range in scale from intimate to monumental; some are immediately discernible as real things while others are hybrids verging on science fiction. There are 29 artworks in total and all are abstractions of their original forms: houses, trees, furniture, swamps. “Home Relics VII” at 5” x 5.5”, appears as hardware from an old drawer oxidized green with a small conch shell attached, intimating that it has been submerged— an unnatural situation for furniture. The immersive “Canopy” (dimensions variable) is a beautifully eerie, life-size sculpture cast from Creole style windows and walls from Trosclair’s family home, with red brick defined by additional pigment. “Canopy” does not “stand” in an upright position, but instead hovers over exhibition visitors, tentlike and ethereal, swaying to the unnatural breeze of an air conditioning vent.
Installed opposite the entrance, “Understory” serves as a key to the logic of the exhibition, hanging flat to the wall, with rooty tendrils languorously draping onto the floor. “Understory” conjures both the organic and man-made, simultaneously invoking tree root systems, insect wings, stained glass, and city maps with its faceted veining and riverbend arch. Consider the cicada nymph’s shell aligning against the silhouette of this piece and its song on these warm September days as its own life draws to a close. Also consider the gallery’s proximity to the riverbend and our eternal cycles of flooding, most recently from Hurricane Francine. In “Woodland Terrains,” tree stumps and rings hang from unfinished plywood walls, conjuring protective boarding for storms and unfinished repairs. The perfect irony of using latex—essentially rubber, a wood derivative—and pieces of wood to evoke trees and bark foreshadows surveys of land loss. Upstairs, hybrids of antique décor and organic details stand alongside works on green-tinted plywood walls. The green color story extends to the sculptures, conjuring moist environments of algae and mold; and Scheele’s Green, a dye used in the 18th and 19th centuries made from copper and arsenic that poisoned its users, signifies polluted water tables. In Trosclair’s casts of antique furniture, architectural and domestic details merge with actual textiles, reborn as adaptive and psychedelic post-disaster amalgams. In “Inheritance,” an antique gilt mirror “grows” jacquard algae, and a pendant lamp case attaches itself like a barnacle, intimating high-water levels. allowed our edges to merge can be framed in the multiple meanings of simulacra, as simulations that create their own reality and as copies of things that forecast the moment for which the original no longer exists. “Canopy” is also visible from the rafters here, and cypress knees cheekily pop up to remind us about resistance. Cypress knees are the remnants of old tree root systems of the city’s watery past, and present tripping hazards in yards and green spaces. They are habitually removed but most always return.
(On view at Sibyl Gallery through October 6)
—Veronica Cross