Artist: Fiona Connor

Maureen Paley presents the second exhibition at the gallery by Los Angeles based artist Fiona Connor, held at the gallery at 4 Herald Street. Bringing together two series of works, I haven't arrived yet and Closed Down Clubs, this exhibition continues Connor’s interrogation of often overlooked peripheral forms and spatial details within sites of exchange and communication.

“The process of remaking something requires obsession: you look at the object and you draw it and map it and work out how to remake it – in some sense you become the thing – and when it is made, although it reminds you of the original thing, it has a different sort of heat because it has been translated through another body and a different set of tools.” – Fiona Connor, 2019.

Closed Down Clubs forms part of an ongoing archive composed of one-to-one reproductions of doors from now-closed nightclub or community establishments. Encountered in situ by Connor, these sites are minutely documented and faithfully re-rendered as freestanding sculptures. Signs of daily wear are maintained, along with paper ephemera, which she recreates and then silkscreens onto aluminium foil. These notices span flyers, eviction notices, stickers, and letters of closure, accentuating the situational and socially constructed nature of space.

Through their careful mimicry, the works from the Closed Down Clubs series offer sculpture as a form of preservation, recalling the accuracy usually reserved for photography. Installed in systematic rows, they evoke the structured nature of a database or archive, generating a facsimile of order from objects drawn from the dispersed public sphere. This arrangement contradicts the inherently haphazard nature of closures to community spaces within an unpredictable private sector. Their freestanding presentation also allows the binary implications a door normally signifies — in /out, locked/unlocked — to be circumnavigated as viewers engage with them on all sides.

The works draw from sites across London, Los Angeles, Toronto, and remote Aotearoa New Zealand. Among them, The Glory recreates the door of the East London LGBTQ+ bar situated on Kingsland Road, which ran from 2014 to 2023. Elsewhere, Papa Cristo's was a Greek restaurant and market that operated for 77 years before closing in May 2025 due to high rents, while The Imperial Pub recreates the door of the eponymous Toronto bar that served its downtown community for eight decades before closing to make way residential properties. Installed together, the works draw these dispersed geographic sites into relation with one another.

Also on display is I haven't arrived yet, 2024, a series of bronze casts of shoes. The work is characteristic of Connor’s approach, which has been described as producing a "crafted readymade". Bronze casting is both an act of faithful reproduction and one of transformation. Connor works within this tension, elevating mass-produced and commonplace items through a material steeped in cultural significance. In doing so, she redirects bronze's commemorative traditions — historically reserved for monuments and public figures — toward the preservation of the overlooked and the temporary. Situated directly on the floor, I haven't arrived yet evokes a domestic sensibility in contrast to the public nature of the venue entrance. Positioned at the threshold of the gallery, the works recall the intimate entryway of a home. These sculptures preserve the creases of worn shoes, lending a quiet care to these everyday objects. Like Closed Down Clubs, the shoes reinforce the idea that space acquires meaning only through occupation and experience.