Seeing Sound: Discussion with Hamza Walker and Micah Silver, moderated by Caroline Ellen Liou
On the occasion of the exhibition Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, curator Caroline Ellen Liou will moderate a discussion with Hamza Walker, Director of LAXART, and Micah Silver, artist, curator, and founder of Black Hole, to hear their experiences and ideas around the presentation of audio, sound, and music in the art space. The conversation will be followed by a walkthrough of the exhibition.
Hamza Walker is Director of LAXART, a nonprofit art space in Los Angeles. Prior to joining LAXART in 2016, he was director of education and associate curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, a non-collecting contemporary art museum. Recent exhibitions at LAXART include Nikita Gale, Takers, 2022; Kandis Williams/Cassandra Press’ The Absolute Right to Exclude (2021); and Postcommodity’s Some Reach While Others Clap (2020).
Micah Silver is an artist, writer, and producer. His book Figures in Air, theorizing audio’s social position as a collective temporaneity-propogating affective AI is in its second printing with Inventory Press. Other writings and diagrams on the social dimensions of art and the information economy have been published by Art Los Angeles Reader, ArtEast Magazine, Okayama Art Summit, NUKE, EAR|WAVE|EVENT, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (CDMX), and others. Since 2002, Silver has presented solo and collaborative intersensory installations that use, audio, sound, air, diagram, scent, and sculpture as compositional material. His work has remained interested in how a sense of place or “being present” is constructed in the time-domain by the ear, using the other senses as synaesthetic staging for a listener. In addition to the more speculative, non-financialized work above, he’s the co-founder of Polytope, an international audio scenography collective that consults with museums, exhibit designers, and architecture firms to bridge gaps in the construction and design process where acoustics, audio, and their related infrastructure is often under-considered, limiting the aesthetic possibilities of the building-as-medium for the future.
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (b. 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. Her work has been included in several group exhibitions, including Made in L.A.: A Version, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2020); Searching the Sky for Rain, Sculpture Center, New York (2019); Soundtracks, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2017); and Geometry of Now, V-A-C Foundation, Moscow (2017). Other solo presentations include those at 356 Mission Rd. and Human Resources, both in Los Angeles. She is represented by François Ghebaly, Los Angeles and Empty Gallery, Hong Kong.
Hamza Walker is Director of LAXART, a nonprofit art space in Los Angeles. Prior to joining LAXART in 2016, he was director of education and associate curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, a non-collecting contemporary art museum. Recent exhibitions at LAXART include Nikita Gale, Takers, 2022; Kandis Williams/Cassandra Press’ The Absolute Right to Exclude (2021); and Postcommodity’s Some Reach While Others Clap (2020).
Micah Silver is an artist, writer, and producer. His book Figures in Air, theorizing audio’s social position as a collective temporaneity-propogating affective AI is in its second printing with Inventory Press. Other writings and diagrams on the social dimensions of art and the information economy have been published by Art Los Angeles Reader, ArtEast Magazine, Okayama Art Summit, NUKE, EAR|WAVE|EVENT, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (CDMX), and others. Since 2002, Silver has presented solo and collaborative intersensory installations that use, audio, sound, air, diagram, scent, and sculpture as compositional material. His work has remained interested in how a sense of place or “being present” is constructed in the time-domain by the ear, using the other senses as synaesthetic staging for a listener. In addition to the more speculative, non-financialized work above, he’s the co-founder of Polytope, an international audio scenography collective that consults with museums, exhibit designers, and architecture firms to bridge gaps in the construction and design process where acoustics, audio, and their related infrastructure is often under-considered, limiting the aesthetic possibilities of the building-as-medium for the future.
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (b. 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. Her work has been included in several group exhibitions, including Made in L.A.: A Version, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2020); Searching the Sky for Rain, Sculpture Center, New York (2019); Soundtracks, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2017); and Geometry of Now, V-A-C Foundation, Moscow (2017). Other solo presentations include those at 356 Mission Rd. and Human Resources, both in Los Angeles. She is represented by François Ghebaly, Los Angeles and Empty Gallery, Hong Kong.
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