Born in 1962, Gilbert Gosselin has worked in the arts since he was a teenager. He started out in marketing, and founded two publicity agencies (Triode stratégies design and Gazoline multimédia) in which his roles included coordinator and communications consultant. He holds a masters in arts education from the University of Quebec in Montreal as well as a degree in visual and multimedia arts.
Gilbert Gosselin currently teaches at the Mont-de-La-Salle secondary school and runs the masters course in arts education at the University of Quebec. As an art teacher, he has also been on the board of the Association Québécoise des Enseignants Spécialisés en Arts Plastiques (AQÉSAP) since 2015. Since 2011, he has covered international arts events such as the Venice Biennial and New York Arts Week, and has published articles in the magazines Vie des arts and Vision.
During his residency at the Château de Goutelas in 2019 with Marc Laforest, Gilbert Gosselin worked on a project on the theme of creating social links: whether one is the host or the guest, there is a mutual desire to come together. In a new situation, such as meeting new people, we re-live our childhood fears and feel again the fear of not being accepted. There is a need for a place where connections can be encouraged, and from this came the artistic installation. In ‘La place à Ti-cul’, an oversized table and chair invite the visitor into a game of hospitality. One of the distinctive features of the installation is its size, with the table as kind of shelter; the other is the castle, made from local bricks and sitting in the shade of the table. The bricks are coloured, like in a child’s toy, and this play space invites us to experience again the comfort that a child feels while playing with their favourite toy underneath the kitchen table.