((PKG)) NYC MET BLIND TOURS
((Banner: Touching Beauty))
((Reporter: Elena Wolf))
((Camera: Max Avloshenko))
((Adapted by: Philip Alexiou))
((Map: New York, New York City))
((Banner: In 2010, Emilie Gossiaux lost her sight in a bicycle accident that a traumatic brain injury. She lost her sight))
((EMILIE GOSSIAUX, ARTIST))
My name is Emilie Gossiaux and I’m an artist.
((NATS))
((EMILIE GOSSIAUX, ARTIST))
I live in New York City, and right now I’m a second year at the Yale University Sculpture program. So, I’m getting my MFA, and this is my first solo show in New York City.
Making work, making art, is more meaningful to me now, because, I don’t know. It just feels good to make something physical, something that I imagine and making it real.
((NATS))
((EMILIE GOSSIAUX, ARTIST))
This one is called “Looking Through the Leaves at Two People Making Out.”
This is a twin bed sheet. The fact that it’s a bed sheet, I was thinking about, you know, what we do in bed. We lay down and we make romances. So, it’s about love and about desire. I’ve been painting since I was 13. 13 was when I started taking oil painting classes, and I just like always been a painter. But I also do sculptures and I think of these paintings on fabric and paintings on drywall as, more as objects. It’s like a crossover between painting and sculpture. This is the first drawing I did of the two people making out.
((KIRBY KERSELS, BOYFRIEND))
To me, she’s been warm, extroverted, bubbly, happy, so I don’t know what she was like before the accident.
((EMILIE GOSSIAUX, ARTIST))
I was really shy, and like I wasn’t very talkative. I was really withdrawn and introverted, and now I feel like I’m a little bit more, I have more of an awareness, I guess, of myself.
((NATS))
((Banner: Gissiaux also is a tour guide for the blind at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.))
((EMILIE GOSSIAUX, ARTIST))
She can do a high five! London, touch, touch! Good girl! Good girl, London!
I really enjoy the educators and the tours here. I feel like I am learning a lot from every experience, engaging with my audiences also.
Okay, so, this is a Chinese artifact, a figure of a dog. The dog actually has a really menacing face like I don’t think we mentioned that before but it looks like it’s growling. It’s snarling at someone.
((REBECCA MCGINNIS, SENIOR MUSEUM EDUCATOR, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART))
What I have always found and I think all of the educators who do descriptive tours for people who are blind or partially sighted, say that they really find that the description, having to articulate what you’re looking at helps them see better, but also helps sighted visitors see better too because they are being guided by the words to look, and therefore their looking is extended.
((EMILIE GOSSIAUX, ARTIST))
This dog also has a collar with studs on it, which is how we know that it was owned by a very wealthy person.
It’s more than a job, you know. It’s just, like, you know, you get an appetite, you’re hungry. I get an appetite to make art. I just feel something and I have to make it. Some people feel like they have to exercise, they have to run. I feel like I have to make art.
