MARSHA PEARCE

You have probably encountered the signs at a museum: Please don’t touch the artwork. You may have viewed a painting or sculpture at a distance, behind a rope or belt that keeps you from getting too close. Yet, there is nothing stopping art from making its impression on us; from making its mark. Art touches us. And that touch can be, at once, brutal and soft. Andil Gosine attends to our aesthetic interactions, exploring intimacy through a kind of tactile quality found in his work. In Magna Carta, a young Gosine poses with arms akimbo at the foot of a concrete staircase.

The image places him at his home in George Village, Trinidad, and at home among the chicken and ducks visible in the foreground. His blue suit culturally encodes him as “boy” (to become “man” someday), but his posture conveys something else: an assertion of comfort and belonging with the animals around him, and a playful defiance of heteronormative ideals. Of course, he is not yet aware of social equations between brown bodies and animality or a calculus that connects notions of the non-human with homosexuality. He is naïve, and it is this first reading of the photograph that touches me. I enter and participate in the image with a certain softness, a care for this child; a gentle connection that holds the more I look. 

Magna Carta. 2025. Andil Gosine. Single 23” x 20” print framed

Born with underdeveloped hips and struggling to bear the weight of his own body, Gosine has fallen down those stairs many times. Poohar, or careless, we would call him in Trinidad. Seen standing in his yard, the photograph portrays him caught between an embrace of the wild, pictured as untamed bush surrounding the house, and an ascension to urban success, as symbolized by the flight of steps. Should he climb again? Or, let nature claim him? How to choose? I feel for Gosine. The photograph may appear still, but it vibrates with this tension — a strain articulated not only in the composition of the image, but also experienced in the image’s reception. 

What registers in the photograph is its capacity to touch the viewer in oppositional ways and to hold space for these affective responses. The photograph moves me, eliciting compassion and tenderness, but a second reading of it reveals an “element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.” Roland Barthes calls this element a photograph’s ‘punctum.’ It is a feature that jumps out at the viewer and has personal resonance. The punctum is that “which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” Photographs can be “punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points.” 

Looking at Magna Carta, I discern a sensitive point. My attention is drawn to a pair of glittering shoes, a visual component Gosine intentionally embellishes. I see him balancing himself, one heel raised with shoe tip to the ground. I am touched. Those shoes and pointed foot are a reminder of how easily violence becomes part of our everyday language and experiences. I remember, as part of my childhood, learning about kick-and-stab shoes: formal footwear with an accentuated point. The shoe’s descriptor underscores the nuance in being dressed to kill. In more recent memory, I recall Marlah Boodram, a 57-year-old mother who was beaten to death at her home in Princes Town, Trinidad. A newspaper reported she was “kicked like a football” by a relative. Seeing the photograph in this way, I am conscious of how the image stings, as much as it touches me lightly; how it bruises me as much as I feel it drawing me in, as if in a caress. It is this simultaneity of sensations that Gosine transposes from this old photograph to other artworks. He makes room for the unruly, rejecting a tidy either/or binary in favor of an insuppressible, ungovernable andness.  

Memory plays an important role in Gosine’s practice of unruliness. My own recollections and his instinctive pull toward the past — an instinct materialized in the photograph — signal how both the artist and viewer meet, indeed, touch, in the space of creative engagement. Gosine’s three-foot sculpture, Ixora Coccinea, is a means of addressing the preservation of memory. Crafted in bronze, the work is a gesture or proposition for a public monument. The sculpture is a scaled-up rendering of a tiny flower from a plant native to Southern India and Sri Lanka. It was brought to the Americas by Indian indentured laborers, following the abolition of slavery in what was the British West Indies. The popular Latinized name “ixora” hides the flower’s Asian origins. Ixora is said to be derived from the Sanskrit Ishwara, another name for the Hindu god Shiva. There is an amnesia that comes with this flower, but Gosine imbues it with his childhood memories. It was his job to pick flowers for pujas (Hindu prayers), but ixoras were not a first-choice offering to the gods, due to their small size. Gosine remembers making garlands with the flowers.

There is a softness in the delicate texture of the ixora petals, but the form this three-dimensional work takes asks us to revisit its edges. Gosine presents the piece with an exaggerated flatness that makes it pointed and sharp. The sculpture can pierce and cut, while also conjuring fondness and warmth. It touches us in ways that highlight the pleasures of daily life intertwined with pain, reflecting the way brutality as a colonial inheritance “hover[s] between green cane field and dark rum-shop, between iron pot and kitchen table, between women’s voices and the sound of rain.” If we accept Gosine’s object as a plan for a monument, we are forced to rethink what we put on a pedestal. Are we ready to publicly acknowledge our existential gray areas? Do we need to? Perhaps our complex lives are already monumental enough.

Some Ones. Andil Gosine. 2025.

Gosine makes his own public confession in his work titled Some Ones. Comprising three Victorian teacups, the piece references a colonized ritual of consumption and social bonding. Each cup carries a printed tag looped around the handle: “Not everyone’s,” “Hardly anyone’s,” and “Just the one’s.” The fact that everyone will not like us can be a harsh reality, but there is solace in being one person’s cup of tea. Gosine contemplates his desire to connect with others. Again, his memories seep into the present. He confronts the trauma of his slow efforts to form bonds with peers during his childhood. He did not make friends until late in high school. His aunts were his playmates. We can feel the agony of separation and isolation in this artwork. Who will pour themselves into these vessels? Can anyone fill these cups? Yet, there is also a touch of whimsy. Gosine brings sadness and play into an intimate dialogue, while interrogating his own relationships. 

These feelings extend to his eight-by-four-foot banner 70,000 Flowers. The loss of time and opportunities for rapport in his formative years is made palpable in this piece, which draws on the effects of our Anthropocene era. Scientists estimate that thousands of flowering species will go extinct before they are discovered by us. Gosine uses nature to reflect on the impossibility of recovering missing developmental moments in his adolescence but with this work he also uncovers a tension in human nature, between human and nature — a tension picked up in Magna Carta and reverberated here. It is this feature of the work that unsettles us even as we find cheer within the banner’s display at the museum’s outdoor garden.

Gosine’s regret and longing for intimacy also surface in his assemblage of garments titled Chicken (Gold Standard). He groups various clothing items from his early years visiting nightclubs. Together, they evoke memories of his first time at a gay club and his first kiss. Gosine remembers the thrill of a man dancing and rubbing against him to the point of tearing the insignia from his pants pocket. He had never felt sexually desirable before that moment. He engages this memory through a number of creative responses. The chosen title for the piece — “chicken” is a precursor to the slang word “twink,” meaning a slim, boyish-looking gay man — invokes self-recognition, but this consciousness of his identity is accompanied by a simultaneity of states. Gosine recalls the elation he felt at the club, while also reckoning with the elusive nature of that experience. The serendipity, romance, and sexual charge of that night are relational features he feels compelled to chase. He, therefore, confronts both bliss and frustration. This andness is made especially visible in his use of a single color, pink, to paint the clothes. The color not only blurs gender lines, disrupting the binary coding of “pink for girls and blue for boys,” it also talks back to Gosine’s Magna Carta in which we see him dressed in a blue suit. Use of a monochromatic palette also recasts how we interpret this fabric sculpture, emphasizing shadow and light in the folds and creases. Gosine’s attention to simultaneity in this work is most tangible in his outlining of the torn pants pocket with gold thread. He directs our eyes to the aftermath of an intimate encounter — a rub and grind that yields the sweetness and injury of interconnection.

His attention to intimacy intensifies in other works. Gosine engages the practice of various artists by making his pieces with and through their art, to address ideas of love, queerness, and his yearning for affiliation. For the video Natures: A Guerilla Girl Story, he positions two moving-image sequences side by side. In these close-up shots, we view him and a white male partner kissing and fondling each other. The artist takes inspiration from Lorraine O’Grady’s photomontage diptych The Clearing, which pictures scenes of an interracial couple making love. O’Grady explains that it is “a simultaneous piece” depicting a relationship that runs “the full gradation from the bright side to the dark side…both ecstasy and exploitation.” Her choice of the diptych format also lends weight to her interest in simultaneity. “When you put two things that are related yet dissimilar in a position of equality on the wall,” she shares, “they set up a ceaseless and unresolvable conversation. The diptych, appearance to the contrary, is anti-dualistic.” Gosine adopts this “anti-dualistic” form. He creates his own “unresolvable conversation,” establishing an andness not only with O’Grady, but also within the video. The tender moment we witness in those video clips resonates as both affectionate and aching.

Les Trois Hommes de Paris: Le Premier, L’Autre et L’un. Andil Gosine. 2022.

This andness is also a feature of Les trois hommes de Paris: le premier, l’autre et l’un. Gosine appropriates three images by Félix Morin, a French photographer who operated a studio in Trinidad’s capital city during the 1800s. Morin recorded people and place throughout the Caribbean, including views of natural vegetation and portraits of Indian immigrants. Gosine uses prints of Morin’s photographs as a means of remembering three significant relationships he has had with French men. Taking each image, he makes his own creative interventions, signing his name over Morin’s. In one photograph, he colors a banana blue, referencing the French flag. In another, he superimposes text on a picture of sapodillas. In the middle image, he adds a bouquet of flowers plucked from Édouard Manet’s Olympia, a controversial nineteenth-century painting noted for its brash approach to representing nudity and sexuality. The subject of Manet’s painting is a white female figure seen reclining on a bed. A Black servant stands near her with the bouquet extended as a gift. In contrast, Gosine gifts the bouquet to a clothed, seated figure in Morin’s photograph, a figure he interprets as neither man nor woman, but rather, genderqueer. This reading of the photograph is amplified when we consider Gosine’s arrangement of the three images. He positions the banana as phallus on one side, and the rounded sapodilla fruit as female counterimage on the other. Looking at these prints together, gender is understood as an inclusive spectrum, and simultaneity is revealed as both an unruly ontological state and a rebellious aesthetic amalgam that layers Gosine and Morin and Manet. 

Let us not forget, however, the artist’s acts of taking in this work. There are sensations of possession and trespass in Gosine’s claim of these images as his own. And yet, we are also touched by what we might describe as his gesture of appreciation. He takes flowers for the lone figure in Morin’s photograph — perhaps a figure with whom he finds affinity; someone in whom he can see himself. If that image is indeed a mirror reflection of Gosine, I wonder about the light that bounces back and what it allows him to discern now, decades after that photograph of a young boy wearing sparkling shoes, standing outside his home in rural south-central Trinidad. How far has he come? Can he strike that same brave pose, today? Is he still entangled in that tension between nature’s wild and society’s dictates of development and progress?  

Lifetime Achievement

Some answers come in the shape and elements of Lifetime Achievement. In this installation, the staircase seen in Magna Carta is now rough concrete fragments, the possibility of a climb reduced to rubble. The young child who was once at ease with the chicken and ducks in his yard appears as an animal, bent over on all fours. Photographed with a saddle on his back, Gosine offers an assertion of his animality or maybe he has acquiesced to the role of beast of burden, a workhorse in a capitalist framework. But what about the animal beyond the confines of work for profit? The animal as genuine lover, partner, friend? Gosine extends himself as a collaborator, partnering with artists Zachari Logan and Romy Ceppetelli to create ceramic objects — impeccably crafted broken eggs and jump up and kiss me flowers — that add symbolic textures of pleasure and loss to this piece. Gosine does not take from these artists. Instead, their dynamic is one of give and take, reciprocity — an andness that interrupts possession. Could this be what achievement looks like? A lifetime commitment to connections and equity in the face of hurt and joy? 

jump up and kiss me crown

Andil Gosine takes us across a span of time between a photograph taken in 1970s George Village and its display at a museum in present-day America. It is an intimate, temporal space in which he considers what he has made of himself; what he has made with others; what he has made for us. In this space, I find myself navigating a rush of pleasure and an arrow that is always shooting out of the artworks to pierce me. And, if I look around for Gosine, I am sure to find him among the flowers and eggshells, caught in a tension of hope and broken dreams, touched by the work of art that is his life — bruised and, at the same time, caressed.