Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork at Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts

Artist: Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork

Exhibition title: Poems of Electronic Air

Venue: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, Massachusetts, US

Date: February 2 – April 7, 2024

Photography: ©Julia Featheringill / images courtesy of the artist, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, Empty Gallery, Hong Kong and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles

Note: Exhibition guide is available here

The Carpenter Center will present Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s (b. 1982) first East Coast institutional solo exhibition, Poems of Electronic Air, on view February 2 to April 7, 2024. With a background in digital music composition and archaeoacoustics, as well as involvement in noise, electronic, and dance music scenes, Kiyomi Gork creates spatialized environments that operate at the collaborative intersections of sound, communications technologies, sculpture, architecture, and performance. Combining recent sculpture with a newly commissioned, site-specific installation made for the concrete spaces within the Carpenter Center’s iconic Le Corbusier-designed building, the exhibition will depart from an array of the artist’s interests, from the sonic histories of club culture and the concert hall, to the protective qualities of clothing, to the resonances of Brutalist architecture.

On view in the Level 3 galleries will be a series of larger-than-life “sound blanket” sculptures made of wool and silicone that resemble different styles of coats; a sound and sculptural installation comprising a dense cluster of wool and fiberglass columns, black river stones, and an interactive sound component featuring contact microphones and bespoke amplified playback. A new outdoor commission on Level 1 will bring together soft architecture that inflates and deflates alongside a new musical composition sited within the center’s public, column-filled, sunken concrete plaza.

Made from hand-felted wool, the artist’s own hair, synthetic hair, satin and mesh lining, and steel hardware, these “sound blanket” sculptures function as massive outerwear—referencing overcoats, puffer jackets, and kimonos. These objects absorb and redirect sound through their materiality and warp the experience of space with their confounding scale—absurdly large if worn yet just big enough to effectively change the acoustics of the space. With a longstanding interest in clothing design and a background in sound design, Kiyomi Gork constructs each sculpture’s shape from enlarged patterns of jackets from the artist’s own closet. As a group, they buffer sound while offering forms that are simultaneously welcoming in their softness and confrontational in their role as oversized body doubles.

Within the Carpenter Center’s central gallery, the artist will create an installation that continues her series Solutions to Common Noise Problems. A rippling, suggestively corporeal wall sculpture made of felt joins a dense cluster of colored wool and fiberglass columns that mimic the Carpenter Center’s existing concrete columns. These works, which soften and recast the concrete stability of Le Corbusier’s modernist architecture, will rise from a layer of black river stones covering a platform raised above the gallery floor. Visitors are encouraged to walk across the stones, under which contact microphones pick up sounds that are fed through signal-processing software and amplified back into the gallery environment. Like many of Kiyomi Gork’s works that research feedback systems and sounds within built environments, this installation casts the viewer in the role of active participant in cultivating embodied knowledge via deep listening in relation to sculptural and sonic forms. The new commission for the Carpenter Center will be installed in the outdoor plaza. Viewed from the space’s perimeter, the kinetic sculptures will resemble an inflatable bounce house, accompanied by music played through loudspeakers. The musical composition, keyed to the sonic identity of the sunken plaza, is designed to integrate the blaring sound of the air blowers, affectively mixing the thrum of industrial mechanics with recorded string instruments.

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (b. 1982, Long Beach, California) earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Stanford University. She has presented solo exhibitions at François Ghebaly, New York; Empty Gallery, Hong Kong; 356 Mission Rd, Los Angeles; Western Front, Vancouver; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, among many others, and her recent group exhibitions include the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. 2019, Los Angeles; SculptureCenter, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; the Berkeley Art Museum; and VAC Foundation, Moscow. She is the recipient of awards from the VIA Art Foundation and the Joan Mitchell Foundation and has participated in a number of prestigious residencies, including Schloss Solitude, Skowhegan School of Drawing and Painting, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. Her works can be found in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center; Hammer Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; K11 Foundation, Hong Kong; and Berkeley Museum of Art. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork: Poems of Electronic Air is made possible by Teiger Foundation. Exhibition funding is provided by Wendy Lee, the Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA), and Girlfriend Fund. Generous support for Carpenter Center programming is provided by the Friends of the Carpenter Center. Special thanks to Empty Gallery, Hong Kong; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles and New York; Margaret Wang; and Meyer Sound.