Charles Goss

        I've mentioned my mentor a few times in previous posts, and I feel like following Ray Johnson is a perfect time to bring him to the focus of a post. Charles Goss has been teaching at the Museum School since 1979, and (with fellow Museum School teacher Robert Siegelman) started the artist in residence program Art In Amsterdam in 1996. I took his class "Art as Process" my first semester at the Museum School, in 2007, and immediately asked him to be my mentor. He is brutally honest, and forces me to expand my ways of thinking and push myself out of my comfort zones and open up in a way that I have infrequently been asked to in art school. Goss' teaching, as well as his artwork, inspires expansion of the way art is looked at. If I became frustrated with a piece, he would tell me to rip it in half, or turn it on its side. In class projects would be outlined in simple terms that begged for consideration of exactly what they could be warped to mean, such as "draw every person you know".
        The playfulness and ability for everything to have multiple layers and meanings that I described in Ray Johnson is present in every aspect of Goss, personality, work, and intent. His work ranges from collage and painting to large scale installations. His solo show, A Vertical Life at the Bromfield Gallery (where he is represented) in 2008 displayed all these talents; the show included 63 collages (shown together and deceptively titled 60) - some of which make references to Johnson, displaying instructions on how to draw a bunny- a bulletin board covered in what seemed to be thousands of notes (Charles is never without scraps of paper literally covered in names, times, etc), a ball of socks hovering over a photograph of the edge of Goss' face looking upward -the socks collected from family and friends, attached together so that the socks from the ones closest to him were closest to the inside of the ball- poles with tiny scraps of metal, found in Amsterdam and Boston, sticking off the edges, a ball of digital watches on a pole, all originally set to go off at the same time, slowly growing apart due to slight differences in their mechanics (I happened to be there at one of the times when the watches went off, it was amazingly cool) as well as a few other pieces, including a couple tongue in cheek references to work.
        Goss' work is not only visually intriguing, but all very meaningful and often humorous. He and Johnson would undoubtedly have gotten along. In addition to his artist's statement, Goss shares on his website an "artist's focus", which, in perfectly descriptive of Goss fashion reads (click to enlarge):

Goss' website
Bromfield Gallery
Art in Amsterdam program




images: charlesgoss.com