Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork Dials Down The Noise

‘This city has a hum – a Manhattan-specific drone music – that I love,’ Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork tells me when we meet in New York, after installing her first institutional solo show on the East Coast – ‘Poems of Electronic Air’– at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. ‘Different parts of the city are characterized by markedly different sounds, down to patches where you can hear whooshes from the subway below.’

Sound – as material, process, system and event – is a phenomenon to which the Los Angeles-based artist is emphatically attuned. Born in Long Beach, California, Kiyomi Gork was ‘one of those kids who was always making art’ to make sense of the world, she says. She cut her teeth in a San Francisco noise band, playing homemade instruments like plastic inflatables rigged with contact microphones. After studying sound art at the now-defunct San Francisco Art Institute, she entered the MFA program at Stanford University, where she researched military sound technologies, and also became involved with the university’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, which was working to reconstruct original experiences of sound at archaeological sites.

‘I’m interested in those scenarios where you can really hear the ways architecture controls sound and movement,’ Kiyomi Gork says. This interest, along with her desire to ‘create what [she] want[s] to experience’, has shaped two decades’ worth of sonic installations and sculptures, often involving meticulous arrangements of microphones, speakers and sculptural or architectural elements made from visually evocative, sound-warping matter. A self-described ‘materials person,’ she regularly collects wide-ranging materials to reference in her art, a habit she picked up working for interior designers; the underpinnings of prohibitively expensive commercial acoustic products often inspire her selections.

Kiyomi Gork sculpts unorthodox media – such as wool, fibreglass, synthetic hair, vinyl and silicone – as well as acoustic processes like feedback, reflection, absorption and attenuation, building ecosystems that foreground sound’s spatial and material dimensions. Carpenter Center gallery-goers can actively orient themselves toward certain sounds as they navigate the installations, or contribute sounds of their own movement to the installations’ recording devices and feedback loops. Consequently, for a medium that can quickly flip between liberatory and disciplinary, agency in the gallery space oscillates: participants are both choreographing their own movements and being choreographed and sound slips between seeming both co-constituted and more externally imposed.

Coinciding with the final months of the Taipei Biennial in which she also features, ‘Poems of Electronic Air’ assembles recent examples from three important bodies of Kiyomi Gork’s work. In the exhibition’s lone commissioned work, a highlight, she pokes at the brutalist self-serious rigidity of The Carpenter Center – famously the only US building designed by Le Corbusier: Variations in Mass Nos. 5, 6, 7 (2024) is a musical choreography of bathetic inflatables installed in the building’s outdoor plaza. Covered with a pattern of rendered bricks based on Harvard’s buildings, three inflatable walls wilt in tandem, draping longingly around Corbusier’s columns, then jointly expand, unfurling like flags and bounding into place, accompanied by overwrought swells of Romantic music and orchestral warm-ups, intercut with the sound of the inflating blowers. As it deflates modernist traditions across media, this playful engagement with notions of aural architecture underscores that sound does not occur in a vacuum – spatially, socially or culturally.

Upstairs are recent examples from two long-running sculpture series, the diffusive ‘Noise Blankets’ (2016–ongoing) and absorptive ‘Sound Blanket’s (2018–ongoing). Inspired by noise reduction sheets, the Sound Blankets (all 2022) manifest as the artist’s scaled-up outerwear: absurdly oversize puffer jackets and peacoats – an apparent wink to Joseph Beuys – made from a whorling brown mixture of hand-felted wool and human and synthetic hair. When I stand between the coats, feeling like a kid hiding in a clothing rack, they soften the room’s ambient hum. Noise Blanket No. 17 (2023) is a wall-mounted kimono – a gesture to the artist’s Okinawan, Japanese and Eastern European heritage – that combines cotton and polyester with slick blooms of brown and white poured silicone. The garment is lined with metal fasteners, prompting auditory imaginings as to how the silicone, an acoustic diffuser, might reshape the sound of their snapping.

Cloistered in an adjacent gallery is Solutions to Common Noise Problems (2021–ongoing), a site-responsive version of a piece that Kiyomi Gork debuted at Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery in 2021. Evoking a Japanese rock garden, the immersive installation features a bed of smooth grey river stones; the wall-mounted Attenuator No. 2 (2021), a substantial tumorous form crafted from beech-coloured wool and polystyrene; and Attenuators Nos. 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 (2024), seven near floor-to-ceiling columns made of fibreglass and wool in marbled telluric tones. The latter respond to Corbusier’s hallmark concrete columns, which cut across the gallery space that the installation occupies. Kiyomi Gork often masks sound frequencies that are dominant in a space with her own version of those sounds. Here, she explains, ‘I was thinking about that architecturally, and how I could "mask" Corbusier’s columns as unimportant in a way.’

When visitors traverse the river stones, weaving between the pillars, the crunch of their footsteps is registered by hidden microphones. The distorted, layered and amplified sound is piped back into the gallery via 12 speakers. How and where we move – gingerly toeing or boldly clomping, toward a bass trap column or an amplificatory patch – changes what we hear, and what we hear in turn changes how and where we move. If the spatial and the sonic are understood to be social, this dance of constant dis- and re-orientation opens onto the larger question of what might become possible if we oriented ourselves differently, less fixedly, to the world.

‘My hope is that people come away a little bit more sensitive, a little bit more aware,’ says Kiyomi Gork of the show. ‘That might be simple, but it also feels meaningful, because it’s so easy to turn off awareness.’

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s ‘Poems of Electronic Air’ is on view at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, until 7 April 2024.

_{Main image: Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, ‘Poems of Electronic Air’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts; photograph: Julia Featheringill}