Fiona Connor’s practice has consistently centred on the unpacking and deconstruction of art’s institutional, architectural and conceptual spaces. Wallworks was Connor’s first solo exhibition in Australia and followed a residency at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA). The institutional support provided through the residency not only served as a mark of recognition of the artist’s practice, but also provided raw material for the content of the exhibition.
Connor’s early projects involved the duplication and re-presentation of a gallery’s architectural elements within the gallery. The scale of work made for previous exhibitions has ranged from the monumental Props (2008), which replicated the entire staircase leading up to Auckland’s Artspace, displayed in its collapsed state on the gallery floor; to the subtle minimalism of Old Buildings (2007) which created the illusion of raising Gambia Castle’s gallery floor by thirty centimetres. Arguably her most famous work, Something Transparent (please go round the back) (2009) saw her repeat the glass façade of Michael Lett Gallery fourteen times–the evenly spaced facsimiles receding one-by-one into the gallery and rendering it inaccessible. A common theme across these works is how they highlight the experiential aspects of the gallery in and of itself. Beyond Connor’s skilful documentation and fabrication, the white cube as construct, and our experience of it, becomes the work. In this way, it is no surprise that Connor’s practice is often discussed in terms of Institutional Critique. By drawing attention to how the gallery functions to shape our experiences, Connor causes us to confront and consider how it operates as an apparatus.
In more recent projects (Mount Gabriel, Ruby and Ash (2012), Bare Use, (2013)) she has quoted vernacular, often quite utilitarian objects
Fiona Connor, Wallwork, 2014. Installation detail. Courtesy the artist and MUMA, Melbourne.
