Frieze New York

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon – Cold World Cycles Warm

Empty Gallery’s booth for Frieze New York 2018 consists of a newly commissioned presentation by Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon, whose hybrid practice integrates sound installation, expanded sculpture, and performance with the aim of reconfiguring the traditional hierarchies between audience, performer, and architecture. Her embodied feedback systems often reference complex sonic histories embedded into the cybernetic infrastructures of architecture, music, archaeology, communications technologies and military research. By investigating the networks of institutional and technological power which traverse our aural perception, the artist hopes to reveal the myriad ways in which our acoustic experience is subject to control and suggest alternative modes of engagement with the sonic world. This booth will be Gordon’s first feature in a commercial art fair and is in continuation with Empty Gallery’s support of the artist’s interest in the material culture of audio production and affective consequences of auditory artifice. Recent projects include “Soundtracks” at SFMoMa and “Geometry of Now” at the VAC Foundation in Moscow.

Empty Gallery’s booth materializes as an acoustically-sound sculptural entity in itself, with an entrance consisting of the transparent PVC strip curtains favored by industrial spaces. Within the infrastructure, two concrete casts of stadium-style speakers weighing in at 100 lbs each hang from steel stands, evoking the aesthetics of stadium concerts and megachurches. When asked to create a sound piece for the fair, the artist states, “all I could imagine was how to escape the noise of the fair while still being seen. Everyone told me the only way was with headphones. But we don’t just listen with our ears, we listen with our whole bodies.” Live audio recorded from the booth will thus be played back through directional speakers mounted in the concrete sculptures. In addition to the four-channel sound sculptures, several colored felt-based pieces insulate the installation’s modular panels and walls for mass and absorption. Materials representing Kiyomi Gordon’s visual and sonic language include cement, speakers, wool, the artists own hair, synthetic hair, cotton, and fabric. The resulting “composition” — which must be traversed spatially in order to be heard — allows visitors to navigate an alternative reality within the existing soundscape.

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon (b. 1982, Long Beach) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from Stanford University. Recent show’s include SFMOMA’s Soundtracks (San Francisco), VAC’s Geometry of Now Festival (Moscow); and solo shows at Human Resources and 356 Mission Rd. (Los Angeles); and Empty Gallery (Hong Kong). Her work is in the collections of SFMOMA, K11 Foundation, Berkeley Art Museum, VAC Foundation and private collections.