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Margaret Mousseau
Above All the Rest
2018

About the Item

Margaret Mousseau Above All the Rest, 2021 Colored pencil on paper 12 x 9 inches 14.25 x 11.25 inches (framed) Signed, titled, dated and annotated on verso The physical and mental hardships Margaret Mousseau suffered from childhood through to adulthood often manifest as subjects in her work. As a teenager, Mousseau’s family forced her to travel from their home in Rhode Island to Florida for five months to complete a pregnancy and carry out an adoption plan. Mousseau made this journey alone and upon her return the experience was never discussed. Though she led a stable life and successfully raised two other sons while working full-time as an X-ray technician, this hardship remained an undercurrent. For over a decade, with her limited means, she searched for the child she had placed into adoption. When Mousseau began drawing in 2016 it was a way to confront fifty years of secrets and sequestered emotions. What immediately manifested was a fully formed visual vernacular of memory, trauma, and fantasy. Mousseau’s colored pencil drawings share formal qualities with the work of Peter Saul and Carroll Dunham, though the idiosyncratic universe of outsider artist Susan Te Kahurangi King must border Mousseau’s very closely. Like these artists, Mousseau processes her experiences through a lexicon of figures and symbols that float, merge, morph and copulate, simultaneously reliving and escaping her experiences. Biographical data is drawn out in pieces like My Bicycle Keeps Me Safe, which depicts a smiling girl cycling happily along a floating dirt road. Behind this girl is a boy traversing a long pathway to his home that is held lovingly by a tree. Crossing to Safety also depicts this same nameless boy, this time fording a raging river with the help of a rope swing and another tree. Taking My Friends for a Ride is a womb-like cut-out in which the artist has drawn a large figure that seems to be governing multiple entities attached to leashes. Mousseau’s use of found paper is evident in these latter works cut into irregular shapes, an act that, along with the drawn borders, gives a heightened sense that the viewer is peering through a portal. Mousseau’s relationship to her own mother, Thelma, is explored in a series of small drawings made on the anniversary of Thelma’s birthday. The artist asked her family members to describe their favorite memory of Thelma. She then drew the scenes from that description and from these drawings created a small booklet that was returned to contributors. Thelma’s spirit is also present in Portrait of the Artist’s Mother in 1935, a reproduction of a portrait of her mother hanging prominently on the wall in her childhood home. There are scenes of fantasy and horror, as with All Mortal Flesh in which the artist draws a bird monster stripping the skin from another bird monster to reveal it as human—Mousseau is terrified of birds—while a purple owl and a damsel in distress look on. Imagined Worlds employs Mousseau’s characteristic morphic formalism to render a cat creature melting in and out of the fantasy landscape over which it presides. This disjointed figuration is seen across Mousseau’s work, as in Hippie Sisters Flying Above the Ground, a work that depicts two sorceresses on magic carpets above an idyllic garden, supported by spiraling energies. Other works whimsically address Mousseau’s daily routines and current events. Mousseau’s double-sided wooden cut-out, Trump’s Barbie/Trump’s Invader, juxtaposes a blond woman with flowers in her hands celebrating something unknown with a man sitting uncomfortably in a chair, eyes wide and angry. Both figures strain at the edges of their invisible barrier in distress. Visiting Professor of Physic and Modern Art from Syria Speaking on Climate Change depicts a woman who had visited the local college to speak. Above All the Rest is a portrait of a snowy owl that had briefly roosted in Mousseau’s hometown and had made the paper. Anderson’s Boston Marathon Bombing Dancer is a portrait of the dance instructor Adrianne Haslet-Davis, who survived the Boston Marathon bombing, but whose left foot was amputated above the ankle. Haslet-Davis and Anderson Cooper joined “CBS This Morning” co-hosts to discuss her return to dancing, back in 2014. Perhaps Mousseau feels kinship to this woman, who has also faced her personal struggles with persistent optimism.

Creator:
Margaret Mousseau (1955, American)
Creation Year:
2018
Dimensions:
Height: 12 in (30.48 cm)Width: 9 in (22.86 cm)
Medium:
Archival Paper,Color Pencil
Movement & Style:
Outsider Art
Period:
21st Century
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Brooklyn, NY
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU188329968702

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