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Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s work is rooted in her intuitive sensitivity to systems of feedback and sound in the built environment. After an encounter with the minimalist composer La Monte Young’s Dream House in 2002, Gork—also trained in dance—began connecting her penchant for movement with what she was hearing. The artist cultivates this embodied knowledge through sound installation, sculpture, and performance that together aim at reconfiguring the traditional hierarchies between audience, performer, and architecture. This blurring begins with her materials, which double as her subject: speakers, soundproofing curtains, and even performers are both the architecture of the work and its point of inquiry. The specter of dance and sound looms over this material back-and-forth, with Gork regularly considering the choreographic potential of acoustic experience—whether pop music or deep listening—in challenging how we encounter art.

Gork’s Variation in Mass #3 consists of an air-blown sculpture that inflates and deflates alongside a timed sound composition. This synchronized performance—paced by the simulation of breath—allows the sculpture, the loudspeaker, and the gallery walls to become component parts of a sonic theater. The moment of the deflation—and the negative space it creates— produce in the words of the artist, a “feeling of empathy” for this dark, anthropomorphous, humorous, and almost grotesque mass. The inflatable and the accompanying sounds are symbiotic; they make space for each other and exist together through a textured give and take of movement.

In Made in L.A. 2020: a version, the artist's work is present in two institutions, across Los Angeles. See Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork's work on view at the Hammer.

BIOGRAPHY
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork was born in 1982 in Long Beach, California. Gork completed academic stints at San Francisco Art Institute and Stanford University, where she studied the history of communication technologies, acoustics, and computer music. After an encounter with the minimalist composer La Monte Young’s Dream House in 2002, Gork began connecting her penchant for movement with what she was hearing. Following this tack, she threw herself into the work of Merce Cunningham and John Cage and the creative methodology of Anna Halprin as a way of reckoning with the potential for collaboration between dance and other genres, such as music and sound. Gork cultivates this hybrid tutelage through sound installation, sculpture, and performance that together aim at reconfiguring the traditional hierarchies between audience, performer, and architecture. This blurring of engagement begins with Gork’s materials, which also double as her subject: speakers, soundproofing curtains, and even performers are both the architecture of the work and its source of inquiry. The specter of dance and sound looms over this material back-and-forth, with Gork regularly considering the choreographic potential of acoustic experience—from pop music to deep listening—in challenging existing modes of engagement with art. Gork’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (2017); 356 Mission, Los Angeles (2017); Western Front, Vancouver (2016); The Lab, San Francisco (2016); and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2016), among others. She has participated in group exhibitions at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017); V-A-C Foundation, Moscow (2018); Mills College Art Museum, Oakland (2015); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2012); and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2011), among others.