Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night

The term “acousmatic” describes sound that is heard without its originating source being visible, such as an off-screen noise in a movie. For Kim there is a similarity between this type of sound—which can be conveyed in writing by closed captions—and the sound of American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters “voicing” a Deaf person. As the artist has explained, these ceramic sculptures are “cementing sounds” in three dimensions to illustrate acousmatic experiences and other personal associations. For each of the pairs within this work, Kim chose different prefixes, such as “scrib” (write, written), “post” (after), and “aur” (ear), and combined them with the word “acousmatic” to consider sound’s relationship to the visual. In Aur-Acousmatic, Kim sculpted a long, vertically oriented ear, which she annotates as “a block of ears, pile of ears.”