The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is pleased to present the twentieth iteration of Vienna — Los Angeles Garage Exchange: Maruša Sagadin & Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork. Vienna-based artist Maruša Sagadin collaborates with Los Angeles artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, responding to each other’s work to develop an exhibition for the Mackey Apartments’ Garage Top gallery.
Sagadin and Kiyomi Gork engage in a collaborative-method of work-creation and installation, presenting new responsive sculptural and sound works for Garage Exchange.
Sagadin produces a new series of wall-hung architectural paper works testing the spatial and symbolic relationship between two-and three-dimensional urbanism. Advertising posters are overpainted, glued and reinforced with aluminum foil. Paper is weathered and folded and hung into fixed shapes referencing elements of the city—blinds, curtains, air conditioning units, railings, rain gutters, or fountains. The shiny aluminum juxtaposed the old and weathered painted posters, mirroring the colors to amplify past visions of the future and rays of light for warmth. These text-less color fields obfuscate the poster’s informational function, drawing attention instead to recirculation, recycling, and impermanence. Small objects playfully emphasize the surrounding context.
Kiyomi Gork continues their attenuator series of soft sculptures, designed to absorb unwanted sound in a space. Previously the attenuator sculptures have taken the form of figurative and geological large scale objects. The new works take an architectural focus in the form of tall wool columns stretching from the floor to ceiling.
The sculptures’ material properties complement a responsive sound work Kiyomi Gork fabricated on-site for the exhibition. Microphones in the Garage Top’s stairwell record noises made by the outdoor environment and visitors entering the space. The sound is then projected and echoed into the shared gallery, further activating the site and interacting with both of the artist’s sculptural works– amplified and softened at the same time.
ABOUT GARAGE EXCHANGE
Garage Exchange seeks to foster relationships, conversations and collaborations in the arts between Los Angeles and Austria. In order to expand the cultural exchange at the core of the Artists and Architects-in-Residence program, The Austrian Federal Chancellery, and the MAK Center invite Austrian and Vienna-based alumni residents to collaborate with L.A. artists and architects of their choosing at the Garage Top at the Mackey Apartments for the Garage Exchange Vienna-Los Angeles exhibition series.
Artists
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (born: 1982, Long Beach, CA) has been working with the intersection of sound, sculpture and performance since 2002. She studied sound art, photography and new genres at the San Francisco Art Institute and researched the history of communication technologies, acoustics and computer music at Stanford University where she received an MFA.
Kiyomi Gork has had solo exhibitions at François Ghebaly, New York; Empty Gallery in Hong Kong; The Lab and Queens Nails Projects in San Francisco and 356 Mission Rd in Los Angeles. She has been a part of group exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, GES-VAC in Moscow, SFMOMA and Sculpture Center, New York. Kiyomi Gork has participated in residencies at Skowhegan, EMPAC, Mills College and Schloss Solitude in addition to receiving multiple grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission, Center for Cultural Innovation, Joan Mitchell Foundation and LACMA Art+Tech Grant.
Performances have included multiple collaborations with Laetitia Sonami, the collective 0th and solo projects.
Kiyomi Gork identifies as a mixed race queer fem (she/they) whose family came to the US, four generations ago from Okinawa (Ryukyu Islands), Japan and Eastern Europe. She was born and raised in Los Angeles and Long Beach.
Maruša Sagadin
Maruša Sagadin was born in 1978 in Ljubljana (Slovenia) and is based in Vienna (Austria). She studied architecture at TU Graz before transitioning to performative arts and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. In 2015/2016, she participated in the ISCP Grant in New York City (USA), and in 2010, she was awarded the Schindler Grant at the MAK – Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles (USA). From 2011 – 2017 she was Assistant Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, in the department for Performative Arts and Sculpture.
Her recent and upcoming exhibitions include Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt, Germany), Museum of Applied Arts (Vienna, Austria), Cukrarna Galleries (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Christine König Gallery in Vienna, Vestjyllands Kunstpavillon (Videbæk, Denmark), SPACE London (London, United Kingdom), NADA (NYC, USA), Austrian Cultural Forum New York (NYC, USA, Warsaw), Syndicate (Cologne, Germany), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, Austria), Neue Galerie (Innsbruck, Austria), Museum of Contemporary Art, Ljubljana (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Belvedere21 (Vienna, Austria), Grazer Kunstverein (Graz, Austria), and Room of Requirement/Horse & Pony Fine Arts (Berlin, Germany). Her both monographs „Maruša Sagadin - ©MMXV“ (Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Vienna), 2016 and „A Happy Hippie“ (Spector Books, Leipzig), 2021 were finalist for Schönste Bücher Österreichs, a prize for books made in Austria from any discipline.
Maruša Sagadin's work is built on the connections and collisions between sculpture, architecture, urban space, gender and language.
Maruša Sagadins sculptures touch on playfulness, imagination, and the pop-cultural accessibility of postmodern art, while working with the motif of the body, its form, its needs, and the care it requires – both the body of the particular viewer they are concerned about (and whom they provide with seating), and the human body as the universal measure of all sculpture. The nature of Maruša Sagadin’s work is neither typical nor unusual for feminist aesthetics – it is one of its many forms. (Vit Havránek)
Maruša Sagadin roams through a pop-cultural canon of urban countercultures, feminist and queer theory and modernist architecture. The compact materiality of her sculptures might be anchored in the visual language of a macho legacy of 20th-century modernism, yet she casually juggles around with these seemingly heavyweight concepts as if they were weightless, not unlike DC Comics’ Wonder Woman. Her critical reappraisal of slacker and skater cultures in correlation to a feminist artistic identity seeks for visual representation within these urban constructs, visualizing the city as a container of architectural memory – a map formed of concrete that only fully reveals its meaning when read in direct relation to its respective communities. (Hannes Ribarits)
Related events
Thursday, November 10, 2022
6:00-8:00 pm
This exhibition series is made possible by The Austrian Federal Chancellery.
Header image: Courtesy of the artists, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Empty Gallery HK, and Maruša Sagadin Christine König Galerie, Vienna, 2022.
Photography: Gabriel Bruce, 2022.