Hailing from Long Beach, artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (1982) studied history of communication technologies, acoustics, and computer music at San Francisco Art Institute and Stanford University. Gork’s work explores the crossroads of sound, installation, performance and sculpture, and frequently draws attention to the ways that the design and materials of the built environment shape a person’s experience of sound and how sound can structure subjective experience. This attunement to the spatial, physical, and emotional dimensions of sound is evident in the artist’s recurring use of sonically functional materials like vinyl sheeting, acoustic foam, air blowers, and felted wool. By employing these materials alongside complex sound processing software, Kiyomi Gork also creates spaces that blur the categories of listener, performer, audience, and stage.
In Gork’s current exhibition at François Ghebaly gallery in New York City, entitled Solutions to Common Noise Problems, microphones, speakers, and massive felted garments hang throughout the space. The microphones feed the noises of visitors into a live processing software. The shuffling of feet, the rustling of clothes, the clearing of a throat—these noises are echoed back into the space via speakers mounted throughout. Certain noises, however, are subtracted. Gork calibrated the custom software to remove harmonic sounds like speech, music, and certain surface reverberations. As sound traverses the gallery space, it becomes absorbed and modified by sculptures positioned across the exhibition, new works in the artist’s ongoing Sound Blanket series. This series, which depart from the artist’s research into militarised sonic weaponry, uses thick felted material to capture and dampen sound waves, protecting the listener from unwanted acoustics in the environment. Here, oversized garments hang from walls and stand on steel supports, arranged to maximise their sonic efficacy.
The artist crafted these works—a trench coat, a bomber jacket, a blazer, a parka, among others—from wool, human hair, and synthetic hair felted together by hand in swirling motifs that evoke geological patterns, fibreglass insulation, wind turbulence, or soft whorls of body hair. By enlarging these garments, Gork emphasises the connotations of shelter, protection, and warmth that could apply equally to architecture and clothing. The coats become architectures at the level of the body, individual sonic pods that bridge personal and public space. Set within a circuitry of sound that uses software to simultaneously emphasise and subtract the listener’s embodied presence, these protective objects serve multiple symbolic and functional purposes. As a whole, the installation holds up a warped sonic mirror to the visitor, offering woollen comfort within a wash of partial, ghostly reverberations of the self (on through Mar 5).
François Ghebaly
391 Grand Street (Lower East Side)
New York, NY 10002
Telephone: +1 646 5599400
Tue-Sat 11am-6pm
Publishers Note
Just to be clear – superfuture® is a design blog and not a political commentator. No surprise there. The scope of our content has always been global and borderless, however that can often mean covering projects in countries where we will not agree with the politics or actions of those countries. In a world that’s as screwed up as ever right now, the focus of our support is to those designers, architects and other creatives who aim to make the world a more liveable one – as opposed to people that try their hardest to destroy it. So if a project hits our desk and we like it based on its design credentials, we may choose to publish regardless of its location or creators nationality. superfuture® has always been inclusive and hopes for all current wars, aggression, violence, hate and extremism to end.
