Fiona Connor, Closed Down Clubs, Hop Louie (2020), via Chateau Shatto
On view this month at Château Shatto in Los Angeles, the gallery presents Fiona Connor’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, My muse is my memory, an archive of Closed Down Clubs. Presented as a quite literal archive of closed spaces, vacant sites of cultural memory, the show makes much of the landscape of Los Angeles, introducing and removing works from the show over the course of its staging.
Fiona Connor, Closed Down Clubs, Once Upon a Page (2020), via Chateau Shatto
For over a decade, Connor has evolved a sculptural language that unsettles objects and environments by reproducing them. Her practice has continually invested in sculpture as a site wherein the formal, social, psychological and discursive properties of objects can be newly animated and observed. This project presents a series of one-to-one reproductions of doors for a range of businesses and nightclubs, community centers and bookshops. Encountered in situ by Connor, these sites are carefully documented and faithfully re-rendered into the form of autonomous, freestanding sculpture, each of which echo and stand in memoriam to the communities and spaces they replicate, and once gave way to.
Fiona Connor, Closed Down Clubs, Avanti Cafe (detail) (2018), via Chateau Shatto
Fiona Connor, Closed Down Clubs, Avanti Cafe (2018), via Chateau Shatto
Within each of the sculptures that constitute Closed Down Clubs, signs of entropic daily wear, ephemera, and hardware are reverse-engineered by Connor through production methods ranging from printing, casting, waxing, painting and commercial-grade fabrication. This fastidious approach gives way to paradoxical objects – the sculptures of Closed Down Clubs concern themselves with the contradictions of ocularity and materiality, underscoring both the innate possibilities, and limitations, of mimetic operations to invoke the latent spirit and phenomena of a subject.
The show is effectively one questioning cultural persistence, circulation, and memory. Space is reserved for various works, while others are occasionally removed, with citation noting their absence. Much like a library, it is a body in flux, mimicking the situations of a cultural underground endemic to any city, where its iconic night spots, gathering places and hang outs are always in the midst of opening or closing.
Fiona Connor, My Muse is my memory, an archive of Closed Down Clubs (Installation View), via Chateau Shatto
By suggestively assuming the form of an active database, repository and institution–unto-itself, My muse is my memory, an archive
of Closed Down Clubs takes the generative capacity of an archive and selectively applies it to dispersed objects in civic space. These
sculptures that replicate shuttered businesses, and the composite body they assemble in aggregate, contradict the inherent conditions
of cessation and finitude that are contained in these commemorating closure. Newly animated by Connor’s reproduction, the doors
converse among themselves, collating disparate psychic, haptic and social histories into a congregation in permanent flux and
choral arrangement.
The show closes April 30th.
– C. Rhinehartt
Read more:
Fiona Connor: My Muse is My Memory, an archive of Closed Down Clubs [Exhibition Site]
