Fiona Conner
at the MAK Center

Connor’s works at the MAK Center—as is the case in most of her work—were duplications of things that, by and large, are only truly experienced in person— whether that be the touch of a worn brass door handle (Closed Down Clubs, Club Tee Gee) (all works 2018), the kicked and nicked bottom side of a plum-colored entryway (Closed Down Clubs, NoHo London Music Hall), or the texture of corroded duct tape stuck on an emergency exit (Closed Down Clubs, The Smell).

As a title, Closed Down Clubs is more fictive than legitimate, being that not all of the establishments featured are actually closed and many are not clubs. (At least two are restaurants, one a bookstore, and one that’s altogether undefined.) Nevertheless, while these portals obviously act as agents of erstwhile monetary exchange, these are also relics of physical access, frozen between states of entry and departure, assembly and dispersal. More pertinently, each work is a token of sidelined identity.

One only need recall the Cheers theme song to emote the pursuit of belonging and shared escape through spaces of congregation. When these establishments shutter, a part of us does as well. Additionally, these works called our attention not only to the potential pitfalls of being a small business owner but of the mortality of brick and mortar stores more generally. Connor, though, was not singing a song of financial victimization and e-commerce heartache, but was rather building a narrative of foreclosed selfhood and belonging. Ironically, the namesakes for the two works that were most regionally emblematic of this kind of belonging, The Smell and Club Tee Gee, are still open.

Closed Down Clubs was not just about communication consumed in transience—the taped note on the door seen while strolling by, “PULL” written in crackled signage, business cards crammed in crevices—but it was also about the state of community in the face of its looming digital annihilation. Indeed, with modes of identity shifting further out of the realm of the real and more into the realm of the immaterial, Connor’s assiduously analogue endeavors gave clarity to this very reality.

Though Connor’s exhibition decidedly conjured extinction, her simulacra reminded us that no matter what technological advances society makes, analogue forms of communication will outlive all others.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 13. 

Fiona Connor, Closed Down Clubs (2018) (installation view). Image courtesy of the artist and MAK Center. Photo: Esteban Schimpf.

Fiona Connor, Closed Down Clubs (2018) (installation view). Image courtesy of the artist and MAK Center. Photo: Esteban Schimpf.

Fiona Connor, Closed Down Clubs (2018) (installation view). Image courtesy of the artist and MAK Center. Photo: Esteban Schimpf.