Fiona Connor at Château Shatto

Fiona Connor, Broken Sleeps (installation view) (2026). Image courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Fiona Connor has often fastidiously replicated architectural fragments of Los Angeles such as sidewalks and doorways, going so far as to reverse engineer graffiti, signs of age, and other blemishes with remarkable precision. Past works, like freestanding recreations of the doors belonging to shuttered businesses, seem to memorialize the material artifacts of a rapidly changing city, freezing them in time before they disappear. Broken Sleeps, Connor’s latest exhibition at Château Shatto, is a departure from her one-to-one models of the built environment. Instead, the show’s main subjects are bed frames, which are transformed through operations of form, scale, and repetition into a series of skeletal sculptures, and tire marks rendered in a series of ghostly wall drawings. Together they assemble a psychological account of a city suspended between waking and dreaming, in which impermanence and instability are not only characteristic of its physical infrastructure but become an affective condition.

Spread throughout the main gallery, dozens of spindly bed frames (all 2026) of differing sizes are arranged in haphazard rows or groups, a few of which spill into a smaller back gallery. They are folded fully or halfway as if to demonstrate the possible configurations of a futon, broken down and flattened, or mangled to produce a spidery biomorphism. While some are constructed of chip board or wood composite, and others cast in bronze, all are painted a uniform matte black. Turning your attention from a doll’s bed collapsed on the floor to a full-sized frame perched upright like a monolith has a disorienting effect, as if perception is dissolving into a dream. Through these relentless repetitions and contortions, reiterated at various scales, what starts as an object you might find left on the sidewalk warps into a collection of gangly structures that look like cages, instruments of torture, or the menacing forms of a night terror.

Fiona Connor, Broken Sleeps (installation view) (2026). Image courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Connor also animates these subjects by surrounding them with her Automobile Skid Mark series (all 2026), which are striated drawings, made directly on the walls, that replicate tire marks originally found on concrete road barriers. Their gray sheen reveals they are actually graphite, but they nonetheless make it seem as if the gallery might be the scene of a car crash, or at least reckless driving, generating a vague sense of disaster. Unsettled from their ordinary context, the skid marks and bed frames play off each other to become a nightmare of urban danger and detritus, making you wonder about the fate of their absent dreamers and drivers. Here, Connor’s preoccupation with the solid fragments of L.A. gives way to something more elusive, conjuring a city haunted by the wreckage of fast cars, discarded dreams, and the always-present possibility of disappearing.

Fiona Connor, Broken Sleeps (2026). Chip board, glue, and paint, 23.75 x 18.25 x 0.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.

Fiona Connor: Broken Sleeps runs from September 9 – October 24, 2026 at Château Shatto.

About the author

Alexander Schneider is a writer and editor currently based in Los Angeles. He holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London.

More by Alexander Schneider

Read More

Snap Review

Jen Smith
at Commonwealth and Council

Snap Review

Ruth Root
at 356 Mission

Snap Review

Leap Before You Look
at The Hammer

Snap Review

Lui Shtini at Harkawik

Support Carla