FIONA CONNOR

Monochromes are resin casts of architectural surfaces found in public spaces that are each used as a community notice board. In some cases these surfaces were intended to be used as bulletin boards, while often they are windows or doors that have been boarded up with plywood and then co-opted for this use. The five monochromatic works in the 1301PE show have been cast from specific locations in Los Angeles.

The casts of five public notice boards will form an index of the real sites, compressing into one unified body the accumulated dents, weathering, paint, staples, and fragments of flyers that remain. Through the casting process, these multiple dimensions of the board are reconstituted in a single material through one process. They are then painted in the color matching the original site. The multiplicity of the functioning notice board is transformed into a monochrome, unifying multiple contradictory actions, appeals, and entities.

The ephemera that accumulates on public notice boards represents a commons, a self-organizing democratic space. The cycle unfolds in time, as flyers go up and come down. There is a tension between the bottom-up gesture of people posting a request or an offer, making an announcement, and the top-down process of “cleaning up” these notice boards, through regular maintenance and renewal. The notice board bears traces of this dynamic, in one unified field, where these contradictory movements are encapsulated in one object. It pulls in multiple directions, towards expression, towards silence.

Fiona Connor was born in Auckland, New Zealand, 1981. She lives and works in Los Angeles. Connor was included in the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial and in the first Los Angeles biennial, Made in L.A. 2012 at the Hammer Museum. Her solo exhibitions include Closed Down Clubs, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Mackey Apartments; Object Classrooms, Govett Brewster Art Gallery; Wallworks at Monash University in Melbourne, Murals and Print (the inaugural exhibition at Various Small Fires), Los Angeles. Recent museum group exhibitions include: Office of Unspecified Services (O.U.S.), Salt Galata, Istanbul, Turkey; Stories of Almost Everyone, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; TL;DR at ARTSPACE, Auckland, New Zealand; Gap, Mark, Sever and Return, Human Resources, Los Angeles; Experimental Impulse, REDCAT, Los Angeles; and Octopus 8, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, Australia. In 2010 she was a finalist for New Zealand’s most prestigious contemporary art award, the Walters Prize.