By title alone, Jacqueline Gordon’s solo exhibition Our Best Machines are Made of Sunshine may sound like warm and flowery new age kitsch, but actually, it feels quite cool, almost chilling. In fact, the title is lifted from Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. The floors, walls and ceiling at Queen’s Nails Projects have been painted snow white, which Gordon has outfitted with three-dimensional wall panels, an audio-rig-cum-monolithic-installation, pencil drawings, and a number of folk-inspired sculptures. Although invisible, steady waves of lumbering sound provide the main ingredient to the overall feeling of Gordon’s exhibition.

The front room houses four sculptural arrays totaling 24 cone speakers and subwoofers, each encased in white pyramidal forms that extend outwards from the walls. These resonation chambers are curiously surrounded by gridded squares with additional patterning embroidered in white vinyl, as if soundproofed to deaden the reflectivity of the space. Three human-sized gray vinyl cushions on the floor provide a little comfort amidst the ominous tones that echo through the space, occasionally at wonderfully high volumes.

Two microphones hidden outside in the gallery awning feed the sounds of Mission Street—the occasional high-heeled passerby, cell phone monologues, roaring engines, squeaking brakes—inside, as source material for automated sonic deconstruction. To be fair, this has many precedents. In the Bay Area alone, sound artists like Thomas Dimuzio or Bob Ostertag have performed by sampling and processing street noise, conversations, and other chance sounds in live experimental improvisations. Yet the focus in this type of work has been more sonically geared. And Gordon’s predecessors have done so without all the visuality that defines Our Best Machines are Made of Sunshine.

Gordon not only reveals the mechanisms behind the sound; she accentuates them. A smaller room within the front room contains what looks to be a sort of technological mainframe, replete with neatly cascading symmetrical trails of wires, visible in the glow of a computer monitor facing the wall, which lights the otherwise pitch black room. This stacked rack also contains amplifiers and effects—what amounts to a complex delay system for piping the exterior inside, then doubling it, tripling that, and so on.

In the back room, eight sculptures are positioned directly on the floor, flanked by five graphite drawings on the walls. At least formally, everything from soccer, extraterrestrial rovers, outsider ceramics, and dentistry all come to mind in these glossy, white constructions. Yet the hand rendered drawings that encircle the back room seem to bridge the more rigid and patterned speaker forms in the front room with the looser construction of the sculptures, which seem intentionally shoddy. These drawings appear almost like studies, flowcharts, or blueprints for the speaker forms, as their shapes are repeated and morphed, or faintly echoed with a referential element or two.

However, like the endearing décor of that long-standing Bay Area treasure of tape music, The Audium, Gordon’s exhibition is presided over by an outdated futuristic aesthetic. Gordon’s works exist temporally displaced, as they draw associations with an unrealized image of the future, still hovering somewhere between the past and the present. As a result, her exhibition seems to divide too simply into three discreet spaces: a Spaceship, a Control Center, and an Alien Planet. It’s doubtful that so reductively narrative a reading was intended, considering the title’s reference to Haraway’s text.

Appropriately enough, Gordon’s installation was used as an instrument in three additional programmed evenings, with performances by several cyborgs including Joshua Churchill, Wobbly, and Nate Boyce. Our Best Machines are Made of Sunshine is an ambitious apparatus and display that raises questions about how sound fits into the visual arts (a question that has, of course, been ongoing for many decades).

At one point during gallery hours, a bus stopped outside. The sound of the bus idling entered Gordon’s machine and struck the resonant frequency of the gallery, making the walls vibrate and rattle. It became clear that the main strength of Gordon’s exhibition is that it is indeed a machine—an instrument that the city unknowingly performs with. One could argue that this machine reclaims and effectively repurposes everything, all of us, subsuming the sounds of the entire city into its operations.

--Chris Fitzpatrick

(All images courtesy of the artist and Queen's Nails Projects.)