- Source: Emilie Louise Gossiaux
Emilie Louise Gossiaux (born 1989, Metairie) is an American multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in New York City. She creates drawings, ceramics, and installations.
Her work engages with themes of interdependence and the entanglements of humans and animals, in conversation with the scholarship of Donna Haraway and recent work in disability studies. A 2022 Brooklyn Rail review of her exhibition Significant Otherness described Gossiaux's sculptures and drawings as "...shot through with the radical intimacy that accompanies recognition of our mutual enmeshment." She has been recognized with numerous awards. In 2023, Gossiaux and Georgina Kleege held a public conversation on her work. Institutions where her work has been shown include MoMA PS1, the Queens Museum, SculptureCenter, Kunsthall Trondheim, and the Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt.
Life
Gossiaux was born in Metairie, Louisiana, near New Orleans, and raised in the nearby suburb of Terrytown. She became interested in art at a young age, but in high school she preferred printmaking and etching to drawing. She began losing her hearing at age five, which worsened as she grew older. While attending Cooper Union, she moved into an apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn with her then-boyfriend in 2009. In May 2010, Gossiaux underwent an operation to receive a cochlear implant.
In October 2010, Gossiaux was hit by a truck while riding her bicycle in Brooklyn, resulting in cardiac arrest, "a traumatic brain injury, a stroke and multiple fractures in her head, pelvis and leg". Initially unresponsive at Bellevue Hospital, medical staff told her parents she would likely not recover. However, Gossiaux became responsive over a month after the accident, and was transferred to NYU Langone Medical Center’s Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine. The accident did leave her blind. The story of her recovery was profiled in a 2011 Radiolab episode which has been recognized for its storytelling and emotional impact. Gossiaux's description of being in a coma had an impact on Ira Glass. In 2016, during her recovery, she was profiled on the Today show.
Gossiaux went on to graduate from Cooper Union in 2014 with a BFA, and began attending graduate school at Yale University in 2017, where she graduated with an MFA in sculpture in 2019.
To adapt to losing her sight, she received 11 months of rehabilitation training at BLIND Incorporated in Minneapolis. During her training, she began working with clay as a medium.
She considers herself to be a disability rights activist.
Work
Many of Gossiaux's sculptures and drawings feature her guide dog London, with whom she has "an interdependent relationship that crisscrosses between maternal, spousal, emotional, and practical." In an Art in America interview, Gossiaux describes her drawings as "giving [London] a kind of agency, and in daily life, she gives me agency too." Since 2020, Gossiaux has not made any art depicting humans besides herself and her partner, Kirby.
In an interview with The Paris Review, Gossiaux calls her process of drawing a "tactile experience". She keeps a ballpoint pen pressed against the paper and is able to feel the impression made by the line. Gossiaux has described the imagery in her work as "mainly from touch memories, for example, the feeling of London's tongue on my hand, or the feeling of her claws on my foot".
Gossiaux was a recipient of the Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists at the Queens Museum for the 2022-2023 year. She was a 2024 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Fellowship.
= Exhibitions
=Gossiaux's previous solo shows include After Image at False Flag Gallery (2018) and Memory of a Body at Mother Gallery Beacon (2020).
In 2020, Gossiaux's work was included in the exhibition In Practice: Total Disbelief at SculptureCenter.
In 2021, Gossiaux's sculpture piece Dancing with London (2021) was included in the exhibition Crip Time at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany.
In 2023, Gossiaux received her first institutional solo-show at the Queens Museum, titled Other-Worlding. That same year, she contributed several ceramic pieces to Finnegan Shannon’s exhibition "Don’t Mind if I Do" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.
In 2024, Gossiaux had her first European solo-show, titled Kinship, at Kunsthall Trondheim.
