For the Dispatches column, Emma Kemp crosses the psychogeography of Fiona Connor’s Continuous Sidewalk, 2023, presented in her Glendale studio by Château Shatto.
Fiona Connor, Continuous Sidewalk, 2021–23. Poured and formed concrete, cast resin and metal inserts, brick, asphalt, paint, silicon, wax, sand and dirt, silkscreen on aluminum, existing space. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles. Photo: Ed Mumford.
Seeing as I was late and had parked in the wrong parking lot, I found myself slow jogging through one of Glendale’s quiet industrial cul-de-sacs in search of Fiona Connor’s studio, which, for the duration of her exhibition Endless Sidewalk, both hosts and is the work.
What happens when you look down is that the perspective feels wrong. Geometric slabs of sidewalk phenomena—mounding tarmac, manhole covers, storm-drain grates—have been transposed on the interior ground at original scale but in implausible proximity.
To achieve this, Connor poured four inches of concrete on top of her studio floor. While the pour was wet, professional concrete workers inserted individual resin panels cast from molds of portions of downtown L.A. sidewalk. Then Connor went to work sweeping, gauging, scraping, dragging, sprinkling, soaking—manipulating the surface in a frenzy of action (think of Chantal Akerman’s animated exertions in Saute ma ville).
Fiona Connor, Continuous Sidewalk, 2021–23. Poured and formed concrete, cast resin and metal inserts, brick, asphalt, paint, silicon, wax, sand and dirt, silkscreen on aluminum, existing space. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles. Photo: Ed Mumford.
The result is a woozy juxtaposition where one segment of sidewalk swerves into another, portioning the ground into a riot of contrasting shapes. Their sudden alignment and dense textures are spellbinding. Clean white walls hem the urban composite: a world turned inside out.
Connor informed a reporter that, as the resin segments are arranged “in an impossible way,” they create “a memory arcade dream space.” When she says “impossible,” she means that their sequencing is notional. She means that her process is complex and idiosyncratic, a negotiation between the artist’s intention and the intrinsic logic of her material. “I follow a script from an object that exists in the world,” she says. But there comes a point where the work speaks up for itself, and the artist gives it the latitude to do so. “I am learning to trust the intelligence that I accrue through material, to follow a rigid system and then allow something else in.” The “something else” is a regulated violation. Connor tolerates the incidental only if it results in formal or semiotic congruity.
Process drawings for Continuous Sidewalk. Photos: Fiona Connor.
For Continuous Sidewalk, Connor’s initial organizing principle had to do with the geospatial mapping technology of her iPhone. I called her and asked to know more. “I’m consistently logging photos of objects I want to make,” she said. “For this project, I began by walking and photographing the sidewalk whenever I had an impulse to do so. My phone automatically logged the locations, which I then revisited and photographed again with a compass.” The addition of the compass is important. It suggests a structural order—each distinct bit of sidewalk is now understood in relation to a larger framework: the grid, the city, the state, the globe.
Continuous Sidewalk is a floor made from images of its subject transformed back into floor. Working in Rhino with fabricator Charles Mathis, Connor made a floor plan of her studio and populated it with her sidewalk pictures, which were interwoven into a single collage. Individual images were blended at 50% opacity, making their borders ambiguous. One rule was that the edge of a photo would roughly line up with the edge of the room. Another was that the images be oriented according to the cardinal directions recorded at the outside sites.
Fiona Connor, Continuous Sidewalk, 2021–23. Poured and formed concrete, cast resin and metal inserts, brick, asphalt, paint, silicon, wax, sand and dirt, silkscreen on aluminum, existing space. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles. Photo: Ed Mumford.
Fiona Connor, Continuous Sidewalk, 2021–23. Poured and formed concrete, cast resin and metal inserts, brick, asphalt, paint, silicon, wax, sand and dirt, silkscreen on aluminum, existing space. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles. Photo: Ed Mumford.
When Connor was satisfied with the composition, she revisited the locations again, armed with enough silicon and clay for making four-by-six-foot molds of the sidewalk, from which the resin casts were later formed.
Consider the energy expended in moving the outside in. It is as if the arcade dream space of de Chirico was graffitied in the night by a manic Paul Klee, ontological disobedience resulting in more than an image and more than an object and more than an outcome. The work is something fierce, collapsed, remarkable. In other words, a totally psychedelic idea. Such manifold form is what endears Fiona Connor to her admirers.
The mind-manifested aspect of Connor’s work—a kind of “chimeric worlding”—is what extends her practice beyond the notion of the replica. Whereas replicas imply a hierarchy between real and fake, Connor reconstructs fragments of reality to tease out long-range equivalencies. She directs the interaction between conventional cultural signifiers and her own established codes, deftly accommodating spatial and temporal distances. “It’s not necessarily about fidelity,” she told me, “but about what opens up when you perform something. The work comes out of an interest in the making of these things—situations, and the experience of them.” In reproducing an already-existing form, Connor undertakes a close study of an object’s origins, recording the impact of time and material forces on its existence to produce something new in the present.
Process photos for Continuous Sidewalk. Photos: Fiona Connor.
Among the virtues of Connor’s work is her deliberate practice of looking. Despite its tactility—its profound physical presence—the work functions as a gestural drawing. Continuous Sidewalk is tender, dusty, matte, chalky, abstract, with the anxious depth of a late Rothko. Connor’s process begins with surveying, measuring, documenting, sketching, researching. She studies in order to understand the particularities of place-in-time and its inhabitants. For many months, in downtown L.A., Connor observed people’s comings and goings, noting how they influenced the pavement, what they did or failed to do. She came to understand who is responsible for what. “Does the restaurant toss its dirty mop-bucket water on the same patch of sidewalk every evening? How does that action impact the space?” In remaking a bit of the world according to its use, accommodating its wear, Connor elegantly performs the intimacy of this coming-to-know.
Candelario Camarena, concrete form worker and finisher, detailing Continuous Sidewalk. Photo: Fiona Connor.
Sidewalks, unlike city streets, are generally maintained by individual property owners. Fiona Connor’s Continuous Sidewalk will be demolished in December. For now, an assistant tends to the floor. As a caretaker, he rearranges dislodged fragments and sweeps gray dust from the cobbles. He videocalls Fiona as he proceeds with his mini repairs. “It makes me so happy,” she said, “adhering to this sacred order that keeps things together.”
I stepped outside. As the sun had travelled, so had I. x
Fiona Connor, Continuous Sidewalk, 2021–23. Poured and formed concrete, cast resin and metal inserts, brick, asphalt, paint, silicon, wax, sand and dirt, silkscreen on aluminum, existing space. Courtesy of the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles. Photo: Ed Mumford.
Emma Kemp lives.