FIONA CONNOR Continuous Sidewalk

Château Shatto is delighted to announce Continuous Sidewalk, a site-specific single-work exhibition by Fiona Connor. The work is installed at the artist’s studio, and has been realized as she prepares to vacate the space after five years of occupancy. Over the last fifteen years, Connor, an artist born in New Zealand and based in Los Angeles, has developed a sculptural language whereby objects and environments are unsettled through processes of reproduction and facsimile. This approach to sculpture is animated by the formal, social and psychological qualities that are harbored within broader, communal spaces. In Continuous Sidewalk, Connor indexes and faithfully reproduces segments of sidewalk located in the Civic Center of Los Angeles. Seamed together as a continuous surface on the floor of her Burbank studio, Connor maintains the cardinal orientation of these sidewalks while imitating their forms and surfaces. The deliberate components that compose a sidewalk, such as asphalt, poured cement, and metal utility boxes, are augmented by the entropy and accretion of contact and time, where sediment, pressure, fissures, marks, and punctures impart human and environmental distinction. In this sense, the work registers the drama of civic life and how dynamic and relational factors interfere with linear intention.

While fundamentally sculpture, the installation experiences a disciplinary over-crowding, whereby techniques of photography, print-making, painting, drawing and performance are employed and then subsumed by a greater whole. This embrace of varied medium-specific processes contributes to a work that exhibits structural and affective elasticity, and more broadly gestures to the highly individuated experience of interfacing within metropolitan sites. Like many of Connor’s previous works, Continuous Sidewalk presses upon the connective point of what is subjective and what is collective, or how the associative residue of memory sits on top of material things.