Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork: Variations in Mass, #1-3

Various Small Fires is pleased to present its first solo exhibition with Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Variations in Mass, #1-3, in the gallery courtyard and sound corridor. Gork, whose multi-media practice meditates on the relationship between sound, architecture, time and the body, debuts her first outdoor work – an immersive, polysensory installation consisting of three new kinetic sculptures.

Embodying both stoic rock formations and clumsy inflatable yard decorations, Gork’s dark gray airblown sculptures are at one moment solid, and at another, vacuous and diffused. They deceptively stage a monumental landscape only to collapse in unison, blending into the courtyard’s decomposed granite floor. With a slow wobble and tumble, the voluminous structures continue to inflate and deflate alongside a timed sound composition – a synchronized performance of breath in which the sculptures, speakers, gallery walls, and open-air are the dancers and singers of a “sonic theater”. A change in air pressure, the pitch of an air blower, and the reverberation of sound waves throughout the courtyard shape an environment that is both continuously shifting and misleading.

Influenced by systems art, minimalist sculpture and experimental composers, Gork carefully conceives of the intangible and mutable aspects of a body’s sensorial experience. Pushing against the static definitions of architecture and earth, Gork embraces the feedback cycles emitted from various physicalities as the instruments of her sonic imaging. Concerned with the shape of a sound or the tonality of a space, a street, or a sky, Gork asks: What does volume feel like? Where does a composition begin and background noise end? Which is technological and which is human?

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Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (b. 1982, Long Beach, CA, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, CA and a MFA from Stanford University, CA. Recent solo exhibitions include 356 Mission Rd, Los Angeles, CA; Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA; and Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, CN. Gork has been included in group exhibitions including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; VAC, Moscow, RU; The Lab, San Francisco, CA; and Queens Nails Projects, San Francisco, CA. She has had residencies at Skowhegan, NY; EMPAC, Troy, NY; and Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, DE; in addition to receiving multiple grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission, Center for Cultural Innovation, and Joan Mitchell Foundation. Her work is in the permanent collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; K11 Foundation, Hong Kong, CN; Berkeley Museum of Art, CA; and VAC Foundation, Moscow, RU.