Fiona Connor at Fine Arts, Sydney

Fine Arts, Sydney is presenting an exhibition of new work by Fiona Connor.

Fiona Connor’s work often remakes or represents sites and objects where there is a context that connects the built environment and local communities, such as in civic or institutional spaces.

This exhibition at Fine Arts, Sydney presents a new body of work comprising white painted casts of noticeboards, each made in moulds that the artist has formed on-site from noticeboard panels fixed to walls within the now-empty art educational campus environment of California Institute of the Arts. Each cast replicates the worn surfaces of panels that are ordinarily well-used analogue sites for exchange of information and communication between people. Connor’s casts of these noticeboards are explicitly about emphasising the experience of material, and the muted, abstracted, and memorialised traces of many encounters.

The exhibition includes new drawings in ink on paper. Connor’s drawings are made from life and by hand, each representing long hours spent observing the interior of the City of Los Angeles General Services Department Publishing Services building in Downtown LA – a civic facility that provides printed matter for public services and local government.

Fiona Connor lives and works in Los Angeles, United States. She was born in 1981 in Auckland, New Zealand, and completed MFA in 2011 at California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, and BFA/BA in 2004 at the University of Auckland Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland. Connor has recently made solo exhibitions at institutions including SculptureCenter, New York (2019); Secession, Vienna (2019); the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles (2018); Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (2018, 2008, 2004); Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2014); Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2012); and Auckland Art Gallery (2010). Her work has been included in large-scale thematic exhibitions including the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017), the 1st and 2nd Los Angeles Biennials (2012, 2014); 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013); and in curated exhibitions at public institutions including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019, 2018); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2019); Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2020, 2016); Auckland Art Gallery (2015); City Gallery Wellington (2015); Christchurch Art Gallery (2011); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2010); Adam Art Gallery, Wellington (2009); Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne (2008); and Artspace, Auckland (2008, 2006).

This is Fiona Connor’s second solo exhibition with Fine Arts, Sydney.