Fiona Connor, “My muse is my memory, an archive of Closed Down Clubs”. Exhibition view at Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles. Photography by Ed Mumford. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles.
Fiona Connor, “My muse is my memory, an archive of Closed Down Clubs”. Exhibition view at Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles. Photography by Ed Mumford. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles.
Fiona Connor, “My muse is my memory, an archive of Closed Down Clubs”. Exhibition view at Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles. Photography by Ed Mumford. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles.
Fiona Connor, “My muse is my memory, an archive of Closed Down Clubs”. Exhibition view at Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles. Photography by Ed Mumford. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles.
Fiona Connor, “My muse is my memory, an archive of Closed Down Clubs”. Exhibition view at Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles. Photography by Ed Mumford. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles.
Fiona Connor, “My muse is my memory, an archive of Closed Down Clubs”. Exhibition view at Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles. Photography by Ed Mumford. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles.
Fiona Connor, “My muse is my memory, an archive of Closed Down Clubs”. Exhibition view at Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles. Photography by Ed Mumford. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles.
For over a decade, Fiona 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.
Initialized by Connor five years ago, “Closed Down Clubs” is an ongoing archive composed of one-to-one reproductions of doors that once stood as the threshold for businesses, venues and community centers. 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.
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.
Fiona Connor, Closed Down Clubs, Club Tee Gee, 2018.
Wooden door, silk screen on coated aluminum, and surface coatings. 213,4 x 91,4 x 4,4 cm. Photography by Ed Mumford. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles.
Fiona Connor, Closed Down Clubs, The Smell, 2017. Wooden door, silk screen on coated aluminum, and surface coatings. 208,3 x 152,4 x 45,1 cm. Photography by Ed Mumford. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles.
Fiona Connor, Closed Down Clubs, Avanti Cafe, 2018. Commercial aluminum-frame door, polycarbonate, silk screen on coated aluminum foil and vinyl, paper, and surface coatings. 212 x 105,4 x 4,4 cm.
Photography by Ed Mumford. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles.
Fiona Connor, Closed Down Clubs, Gioia and Gioie, 2022. Glass door, hardware, silk screen on coated aluminum foil and vinyl, tape, and surface coatings. 213,4 x 91,4 x 3,2 cm. Photography by Ed Mumford. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles.
Fiona Connor, Closed Down Clubs, NoHo London Music Hall, 2017. Wooden frame glass door, silk screen on coated aluminum foil, and surface coatings. 208,9 x 98,4 x 14,6 cm. Photography by Ed Mumford. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles.
Fiona Connor, Closed Down Clubs, Once Upon a Page, 2020. Commercial aluminum-frame door, polycarbonate, hardware, silk screen on coated aluminum foil, vinyl, and surface coatings. 213,4 x 104,1 12,7 cm.
Photography by Ed Mumford. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles.
Fiona Connor, Closed Down Clubs, Circus of Books, 2018. Commercial aluminum-frame glass doors, silk screen on coated aluminum foil, vinyl, and surface coatings. 212,1 x 106,1 x 5,1 cm.
Photography by Ed Mumford. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles.
Organized within the structure of “My muse is my memory, an archive of Closed Down Clubs” is a premise of objects and articles in circulation. Akin to a lending library, non-present sculptures are accounted for through gaps within the exhibition, referring both to works-in-progress slated for installation during the course of the show, and those which are extant yet absent. Further articles, such as takeaway posters derived from walkthrough transcriptions and exhibition texts, will be introduced within the show on a weekly basis.
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 conversate among themselves, collating disparate psychic, haptic and social histories into a congregation in permanent flux and choral arrangement.
