Not Exactly (Whatever the New Key Is) 2017-ongoing, PVC tarpaulin walls, centrifugal blowers, Arduino microcontroller, MIDI and trigger relay. Dimensions variable. Music: MNDR Production: Peter Wade Keusch Production and Engineering. Singers: carolyn pennypacker riggs, jonathan Mandabach and MNDR Courtesy of the artist, Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles.
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork is an artist who expands acoustical treatments of space into objects of heightened sensitivity and feeling. Not Exactly (Whatever the New Key Is), 2017–ongoing, is a six-channel sound and inflatable installation that blasts resonant frequencies from an array of blowers through a speaker system as the same blowers inflate a surrounding soft vinyl structure whose black color blurs into the darkness of the surrounding room. As the structure heaves and the fans blow like an inhuman orchestra, the complex effect of sonic immersion and spatial reconfiguration causes the room itself to appear emotionally responsive.
The entire space—including the viewer’s body and perception—turns into a musical instrument that in turn plays other elements in the room, causing the tone coming from individual blowers to emerge from a mask of white noise. Suddenly, everything around you grows to a crescendo, the inflatable structure exhales all of its air, and a solitary voice cuts through the darkness to invite a crossing into another domain where seduction and immersion are strangely comforting, even when surrounded by machines tuned and balanced as sensory objects. In Not Exactly (Whatever the New Key Is), sadness and joy, inhaling and exhaling, tension and release are not just private sensations but ambient and reflective states of being shared with surrounding and sympathetic architecture.
Music: MNDR Production, Peter Wade Keusch Production and Engineering
Singers: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs, Jonathan Mandabach and MNDR
