“Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon: It Only Happens All of the Time” opens at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Los Angeles-based artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon works in sound, installation and sculpture. Gordon investigates sonic and architectural applications of cybernetic systems in the 20th and 21st centuries to technological design, from anechoic chambers to the military’s use of Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) speakers. Reverse engineering those implements of social control, often through the use of audio and spatial feedback systems that manipulate the visitor’s senses; the dissonant spaces she creates uncover how such systems regulate human subjectivity, mobility and perception.

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon, IWYTWMTWYTWM (I Want You To Want Me To Want You To Want Me), 2014, courtesy the artist.

For her solo exhibition It Only Happens All of the Time, Gordon explores sound’s ability to establish different levels of intimacy; sound as experienced within the body becomes a way to feel with others, and to experience the mechanisms of built space through non-visual means. Newly commissioned by YBCA, the exhibition features a fully immersive sonic environment as well as a sculpture entitled “Love Seat” in the Upstairs Gallery that emphasizes the primacy of the embodied experience; one that encourages the visitor to navigate the space through a mode of listening that is both felt and heard. Gordon uses sound absorbing walls in her installation that are inspired by a military or scientific testing facility in which conditions are controlled in order to achieve a particular end result. In contrast to the walls of the installation, which gestures towards a calculated experience, the sculpture “Love Seat” situated within this contained environment suggests another, more emancipated, arrangement. Surrounded by a multichannel speaker system distributed throughout the gallery, “Love Seat” encourages visitors to sit and share in a listening experience with others, while maintaining a physical separation. Fostering an exchange between visitors that wavers between proximity and distance, “Love Seat” parallels how we listen together. Gordon’s other works for the exhibition, which include sculpture, video and a new series of drawings, similarly invite reflection on the many ways technology governs the body through the design of sound and space.