This Way: Emilie Gossiaux
Warmer weather is upon us, vaccine distribution is gradually expanding, and yet after a year of being largely home-bound, many of us may need a little encouragement (or even instruction!) on how to re-emerge into the outside world or perhaps simply re-engage our daily environment. With this in mind, MIT List Visual Arts Center has organized This Way, a series of nine artist-designed walks and experiences that offer us diverse points of entry—some intimate explorations of physical embodiment and sensory experience, others guided modifications of scale, space, and geography, or novel considerations of language, architectures, or landscapes. Borrowing its title from a 1961 series by conceptual artist Stanley Brouwn, while also drawing inspiration from Fluxus and the dérive or “drift” of the Situationists, This Way takes up themes of movement and performance, ritual and meditation, and both abstract and concrete explorations of a range of spaces we occupy.
A new iteration of This Way will be released on the List Center website every other Wednesday, from May 12 to September 8, 2021. Each release will consist of both a written prompt, available as a PDF, and an audio component, recorded by one of the nine invited artists.
Artists creating the series’ prompts include: Morgan Bassichis, Rafael Domenech, Shannon Finnegan, Maria Gaspar, Emilie Gossiaux, Corin Hewitt, David Horvitz, Heather Kapplow, and Xaviera Simmons.
Artist-designed prompts can be experienced anywhere and anytime. Visit the program page to learn more about the series. Register to receive a new release of This Way in your inbox every other week.
Accessibility
This series will include screen reader enabled PDFs for written components, and transcripts for audio components.
About the Artist
Emilie Gossiaux is a multi-disciplinary artist working in New York City. She received her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2014, and her MFA from Yale University in Sculpture in 2019. Since losing her vision in 2010, Gossiaux’s altered experience of the world has seen her practice grow—finding inspiration in dreams, memories, sensuality, and non-visual sensory perceptions. Relying solely on her sense of touch and proprioception, she demonstrates a profound sensitivity towards texture, space, and material. Alongside her studio practice, Gossiaux works as a museum educator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art with Access and Community programs. She co-teaches a studio class for blind and visually impaired visitors in the Met’s Seeing Through Drawing program and has led gallery tours for general audiences exploring cross-sensory themes with the museum’s permanent collection.
Gossiaux’s work has been featured in numerous shows at The Shed, New York; Mother Gallery Beacon, New York; SculptureCenter, New York; False Flag Gallery, New York; The Cooper Hewitt, New York; Pippy Houldsworth, London; and The Smithsonian Institute of Art, Washington, DC; among others. She has won several honors and awards, including The John F. Kennedy Center’s VSA Prize for Excellence in 2013, the Elliot Lash Memorial Prize for Excellence in Sculpture in 2014, a Wynn Newhouse Award in 2018, and attended the Dumfries House Residency in Scotland, selected by the Royal Drawing School, in 2018.