Dates: July 18 - August 23 2008

Location: SFAC Gallery, window installation site, 155 Grove Street, San Francisco, CA

Hours: twenty-four hour viewing

The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery is please to present Jacqueline Gordon’s site-specific light, sound, and sculptural installation, SYNAH sometimes you need a hole, at our window installation site at 155 Grove Street.

Gordon’s work focuses on the integration of contemporary folk aesthetics with the emergent technology of sound imaging. A wide range of sources, including science fiction, patterns recurrent in nature and collected sounds are synthesized to create inhabitable sculptures that alter one’s physical experience evoking feelings of intimacy and connectedness or confinement and isolation.

For this commission the SFAC Gallery asked Gordon to step outside of her normal strategy and create a sculpture that cannot be entered, but instead is viewed from the outside via the windows. The resulting multi-sensory installation will compel passersby to look through an oblong viewfinder that will reveal a cave-like structure inspired by spacecrafts and the nests of solitary insects. At the end of the hole the viewer will find a series of LED light bulbs that illuminate in synchronicity with altered sound recordings collected from the neighborhood’s natural soundscape. Additionally to the constraints of the inaccessibility of the space, the sculpture itself, which is formed by a wooden armature that suspends quilted fabric, has no entry for a body, causing SYNAH to be an exclusively voyeuristic space, a hole that no one will ever inhabit.

In her artist statement Gordon says, “The traditions of both folk art and technology depend on processes and techniques that echo social values and needs. My method involves the folk art techniques of quilting, fiber arts, and woodworking with computer and audio system constructions. By using these processes I cultivate an awareness of sounds on an elevated level and expand the possibilities for connection and interaction with one’s environment.”

Jacqueline Gordon is a visual and sound artist who currently resides in San Francisco. She participated in the New York Studio Program in 2002 and received her BFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. Gordon’s work has been shown in the bay area at Lobot Gallery, the LAB, Ego Park, and A Little Display. In 2006 Gordon participated in the Circuit Bending Festival in New York City. She has also preformed in numerous sound projects, under her own name, the moniker japjap and collaboratively in the electric acoustic project Bones, and the all female rock group 0th. This fall Gordon will be an artist-in-residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE.