Gama
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork
Opening: Saturday, September 27, 5–7PM
Empty Gallery is pleased to present Gama, our third solo exhibition with Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork. Often aiming to reconfigure received hierarchies between audience, performer, and exhibition architecture, Gork’s practice exists in the slippery disciplinary interstice between sculpture and sound installation. Acutely sensitive to the ways in which the sonic world regulates and molds our sense of subjective interiority, she simultaneously subverts and draws on the legacy of cybernetics—creating systems of embodied feedback which seek to mobilize the emancipatory potential latent within everyday materials and infrastructures, as well as the simple act of listening.
For her third solo exhibition at the gallery, Gork directs her practice towards the entanglement of the individual within a matrix of collective memories and traumas; formations which determine her on a somatic level, but which can only be known through the abstraction of history. Drawing on her own family history, research into historical records, and geographical explorations, Gama seeks to transmute her reflections on the specters of both American and Japanese imperialism (and the charged silence surrounding the Battle of Okinawa) into a psychoacoustic landscape within the gallery. Scattered across the upper and lower floors are a sequence of haunting ceramic reliefs—formed using a type of red clay unique to Okinawa—whose forms mirror at once the complex internal topographies of the island’s various limestone caverns as well as their resultant echoes. Conceived less as static architectures than as permeable membranes, their organic contours are animated by the sound of water and metal emanating from a series of new sculptures assembled from aviation scrap. Referencing the form of so-called “zen fountains” often found in new age or therapeutic settings, Gork’s devices instead confound our desires for relaxation and closure; forcing us, with their unapologetic intensity, towards an embodied awareness of our own agency.
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (b.1982, Los Angeles) studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and researched the history of acoustics and computer music at Stanford University. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University (2024); Visual Arts Center, University of Texas Austin (2023); Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (2021, 2017); François Ghebaly (2022); 356 Mission, Los Angeles (2017); The Lab, San Francisco (2016); and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2016).
She has participated in group exhibitions at the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2025); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (Made in LA 2020); SculptureCenter, New York (2019); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017) and V-A-C Foundation, Moscow (2018). She is a recipient of the Gold Art Prize (2025), a Roy Lichtenstein Award from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts (2025), a Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2023) and an Art + Technology Lab Grant from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2021). She participated in the 13th Taipei Biennial: small world (2023). Her work is in the collections of The Hammer Museum, SFMoMA, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives and Walker Art Center.