Cindy Gosselin at
Super Rough
June 9-27, 2021
"The Outsider Art Fair is excited to present Super-Rough, a large-scale group exhibition of close to two hundred sculptural works by approximately 60 self-taught, visionary and vernacular folk artists from around the world. Overseen by Takashi Murakami, in collaboration with several dozen Outsider Art Fair dealers and gallerists, the show takes place in a raw, expansive ground floor space in SoHo, New York City.
Super-Rough, a word play on Superflat–Murakami’s highly influential term for a new genre of Japanese Pop Art that emerged at the turn of the millennium, proposes the private and idiosyncratic universe of Outsider Art as an alternative to the ongoing spectacle of contemporary art and popular culture. Also referencing Outsider Art’s DIY dimensionality and handmade aesthetic, Super-Rough offers a diametrical departure from the slick seductive surfaces of a shiny consumer consciousness. At the same time it reflects Murakami’s understanding that in visual culture there is equivalence to all manners of art, a super-flattening of prior hierarchical distinctions between fine art and popular or vernacular arts, between what is professional and institutionally ratified and what is self-taught. On the compositional and textural implications of an adjective like “rough” Murakami cites the calligraphic Zen paintings of temple monks and Buddhist sculpture, in which studied refinement gradually drifts towards a rougher abstraction, and how in each there is a forceful connection between refinement and roughness. He also sees a connection between religious art and the spiritual strain in Outsider Art, explaining that “Outsider Artists don’t think about unnecessary things, they focus in on that state.”
About Cindy Gosselin:
Through a combination of wrapping motions -- spinning, winding, twisting, and dropping – Cindy Gosselin (b. 1964) creates her bound sculptures with a focused, obsessive intensity. Pulling various found objects into the cocoon-like forms, from wooden spools to house keys, they continue to morph and grow until Gosselin deems them “too heavy.” The artist is blind, and her bound vessels are created entirely through her sense of touch.
Gosselin’s work has been widely collected in Philadelphia and New York. Her sculptures have been exhibited at Weird Days (now Summertime) in Brooklyn, NADA NYC, Outsider Art Fair, and Philadelphia’s artist-run galleries Pageant Soloveev, FJORD, and Spillway Collective. Her work is currently on view at ArtYard in the two-person exhibition "I Just Want to Know."
Aside from her sculpture, Gosselin has a sincere passion for music, and has performed in a number of venues in Philadelphia. She works at the Center for Creative Works five days a week, and has been working there since its founding in 2011.
