Ma #1 & Ma #2 (Bedroom window of John McLaughlin at his home...

Ma #1 & Ma #2 (Bedroom window of John McLaughlin at his home in Dana Point)

Object Classrooms #2 belongs to Fiona Connor’s larger body of work Object Classrooms, which was commissioned by the Govett-Brewster in 2016.

Connor’s project tracked the movement and eventual disappearance of an artwork as it was transported around galleries, art institutions and conservation departments in Aotearoa New Zealand in the mid-1970s. Thinking through the inheritances of modernist abstraction, Connor’s project asks where the art object ends and where the infrastructures necessary for art’s safety, presentation and distribution begin. Playfully dwelling on an historic institutional mishap, Connor conjures the painting within a network of relations—and in doing so, insists that authorship is always conversational, and meaning always multiple and contingent.

The painting, created by Los Angeles artist John McLaughlin—a pioneer of minimalist abstraction on the West Coast of the United States—was included in the exhibition State of California Painting, organised by then-Govett-Brewster Art Gallery director Bob Ballard in 1972. At some point during the exhibition, the painting was spat on by a visitor. The work was sent to Auckland Art Gallery for conservation and, at some point during its travels, was lost. It has not been located since.

Forming part of a long-term investigation into the life and legacy of McLaughlin’s work, Ma#1 and Ma#2 are faithfully constructed reproductions of two adjacent windows from the artist’s former home in Dana Point, California. Reproduction is a central part of Connor’s practice. Throughout her career, the artist produces exacting replicas of architectural features found in the world, including the accumulated traces of dirt, weathering, human use and neglect.

Inserted directly into the gallery walls, the works make visible years of exhibition-making and alterations. Here, the rectangular frame of the windows mimics the rectangular forms of McLaughlin’s paintings. As with Connor’s other replications, the artist encourages consideration of the traces people leave behind in architectural space, and the community of use behind every public or semi-public surface. Connor’s sculptural work might be read as a gentle critique of mid-century arguments which congealed around abstractionism like McLaughlin’s—which would claim the art object as autonomous, meaning as static, and the artist as a holder of great truths. In Connor’s work, all meaning is relational, and all objects porous—bringing with them traces of community and encounter.

— Simon Gennard, 2023
Adapted from Fiona Connor, Object Classrooms (2018) exhibition text, by Sophie O’Brien and Tendai Mutambu