Elysian: Works by Caroline Clerc

Gallery Hours

Before all TCA events when the Community Auditorium is open. Please call our office to make an appointment to see the show outside of these times: (575) 758-2052.

About the show

Elysian brings together two projects that explore environmental and familial spaces. One component is an ongoing body of work examining the interplay between natural and constructed environments. Found materials, collected during daily walks in Elysian Park, Los Angeles, are incorporated into studio sculptures. These sculptures are photographed and then digitally manipulated, shifting between two and three-dimensional space, abstraction, and representation. The resulting large-format images are exhibited alongside smaller landscape photographs taken during those same walks—a cumulative reflection on debris, routine, and the convergence of the natural and built worlds.

The second component turns inward, reflecting on what is left behind within a family home. When my mother passed away, she had lived in her house for fifty years. As my siblings and I sorted through her belongings, some items felt neutral, while others resonated. This process became a navigation of presence and absence, of what is known and what remains unknown. The project takes form as a series of nine photographs: images of arranged objects paired with photographs of the family home and neighborhood. Accompanying these are seven small collages made from magazine clippings—depictions of ideal patios and blooming roses—that gesture toward aspirational visions of leisure and domestic life.

Together, these projects blur boundaries between interior and exterior, between personal memory and public space. Reconfigured materials—both natural and domestic—are unmoored from their original contexts, discovered in the act of being misplaced, salvaged, discarded, or found.

Artist Bio

I am a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography. My art practice is a means to research and communicate environmental concerns and re-frame our relationship with ecology. My work is first performed through long walks in the environment. I make photographs in the field and then composite these images with spatial incongruities that complicate the viewer’s relationship to the landscape.

I also create studio-based constructions using materials found during these walks—objects that reveal ongoing cycles of transformation. These temporary, precarious installations are photographed, digitally altered, and at times reimagined as sculptural installations, creating a feedback loop between documentation and material presence. My work resists a singular point of view or fixed moment in time, instead shifting perspectives to emphasize multiplicity. It prioritizes environmental awareness and reflects a dialogue between the landscapes we inhabit and those we move through.

My work has been exhibited in galleries in Los Angeles, naKonally, and internationally including Aleksanterin Linna, (Finland), Kunstbezirk Galerie (Germany), Caetani Cultural Centre (Canada), and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, among others. Residencies include Obracadobra (Oaxaca, Mexico), Millay Colony for the Arts (New York), Nordic Artists’ Centre Dale (Norway), Nature, Art and Habitat (Taleggio Valley, Italy), Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Studies (Montana), Caetani Cultural Centre (Canada), NAIRS Foundation (Switzerland), Serlachius Residency (Finland), Prairie Ronde Residency (Michigan), and Helene Wurlitzer Artist Residency (New Mexico). I am an Associate Professor of Teaching at the University of Southern California, where I teach studio art courses in photography.