BASEL.- For Art Basel 2026, the gallery will present a Statements booth foregrounding the New York-based artist Emilie Louise Gossiaux (b. 1989, New Orleans, LA). As a multidisciplinary artist who is also blind, Gossiaux translates their inner worlds into the physical realm through works based on dreams, memories, and their sense of touch— an exploration of interdependence, Disability, and the interspecies kinship that centers the decade long relationship with their Guide Dog and animal companion, London.

Gossiaux’s sculptural "Butterflydog" installation at Art Basel is shown amidst newly-made tactile ballpoint pen and crayon drawings. The many hybridized dogs depicted in both Art Basel and a concurrent large-scale presentation at the 2026 Whitney Biennial are representations of London—the 15 year-old Labrador who is the artist’s retired Guide Dog and animal companion. Born the same year that Gossiaux became blind, their relationship has grown simultaneously spousal, maternal, emotional, practical and even contractual—a bond built upon years of mutual respect, care, and trust.

Gossiaux has described their inter-species relationship as a “commitment to each other (which) feels more like a marriage, for better or for worse until death do us part, we are entangled together… London has given me increased independence, love and companionship. I am also conscious of the dehumanization I’ve faced moving through the world attached to a dog. As a deaf blind person, I have been compared to a dog, and thought of as a burden, needing to be cared for by another. Through these feelings of being deemed ’less than,’ I feel a deep kinship of otherness with London, and a sense of empowerment when we move together as one, like a ‘super-being’ that defies prevailing ableist beliefs.”

In this larger iteration of a previously hand-sized ceramic work, the three dogs made of papier-mâché will be free-standing, leaping up and taking flight, bodies twisting and turning to playfully interact with each other with delicate butterfly wings protruding from their backs. For Gossiaux, images appear for them in their dreams, and this ritual-like depiction of London as a butterfly is understood by the artist’s dream-self as the way she transformed upon death.

These hybrid superbeings disrupt hierarchies that place man over animal, and the non-disabled over disabled bodies. In later years of her life, London became disabled with limited use of her hind legs— their routines of caregiving took on new forms in that new period. Accompanying this reciprocal tenderness was a heightened awareness that London’s time on this Earth will be much shorter than Emilie’s. Their process of art-making has begun to reflect spiritual ceremonial burial practices— particularly those in which the human is buried alongside non-human, facing the unknown horizon with hand clasped to paw.

Emilie Louise Gossiaux (b. 1989, New Orleans, LA) is an artist who lives and works in New York. Gossiaux has presented solo exhibitions at David Peter Francis, New York; CASTLE, Los Angeles; Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim, Norway; Wave Hill House, the Bronx; Queens Museum, Queens; Mother Gallery, New York; and False Flag Gallery, Queens. Their work is currently included in the Whitney Biennial 2026 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. They have also been included in group exhibitions at Busan MOCA, Busan, South Korea; Kunstverein Hannover, Hannover, Germany; MoCa Cleveland, Cleveland; The John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan; Wellcome Collection, London, UK; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield; MoMA PS1, Queens; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; The Krannert Art Museum, Champagne; The Shed, New York; SculptureCenter, Queens; and Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, amongst others. In 2024, Gossiaux was the recipient of both the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship and the Ida Applebroog Grant.