Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork: Solutions to Common Noise Problems

Francois Ghebaly is proud to present Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition, Solutions to Common Noise Problems, will open in New York on January 29, 2022 and remain on view through March 5, 2022. 

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork explores the crossroads of sound, installation, performance and sculpture. Their work 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 creates spaces that blur the discrete categories of listener, performer, audience, and stage. 

In Kiyomi Gork’s new exhibition 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. Kiyomi Gork calibrated the custom software to remove harmonic sounds like speech, music, and certain surface reverberations. 

As sound traverses the 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 departs from the artist’s research into militarized 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 maximize 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, fiberglass insulation, wind turbulence, or soft whorls of body hair. 

By enlarging these garments, Kiyomi Gork emphasizes 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 emphasize 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 woolen comfort within a wash of partial, ghostly reverberations of the self.

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (b. 1982, Long Beach, California) is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (2021); 356 Mission, Los Angeles (2017); The Lab, San Francisco (2016); and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2016). Their sculptural and sonic installations have also been included in prominent group exhibitions including the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial (2020); SculptureCenter, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017); and VAC Foundation, Moscow (2018). They are a recipient of a 2021 Art + Technology Lab Grant from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This is their first solo exhibition in New York.