Community Notice Board (Celeste Coin Laundry)

The work of Aotearoa-born, Los Angeles-based artist Fiona Connor draws on traditions of painting, sculpture, and installation, and is closely entwined with the histories of architecture and urban design. Connor’s practice often involves the production of replicas of real-world entities. She plays with notions of mimesis and hyperrealism, and challenges preconceptions of how art ought to be made and experienced. She is interested in the ways in which places or environments affect communities, holding common stories and experiences. She has commented, ‘I may not know anything about you. But what we have in common is this room. And what everyone in this room has in common is this room.’

Among Connor’s most important recent works are her ‘Community Notice Boards’, in which she recreates bulletin boards from a wide range of public spaces. Flyers, pamphlets, business cards, and other ephemera are reproduced on aluminium sheets using screen-printing and UV-printing techniques. Her Los Angeles gallery, 1301PE, has commented, ‘Frozen at the moment Connor turned the notice boards into art, the works present micro-histories of communities … Documenting the obsolescence of the bulletin board, these works address the influence of Internet technologies on new modes of communication.’

The community notice board makes for a complex subject. The form is universal. Notice boards from all over the world look and feel very similar, and they have kindred purposes. At the same time, each example is strongly located in space, time, and social context—hyper-specific. The place of origin of Community Notice Board (Celeste Coin Laundry) is a low-cost laundromat at 5220 Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. The work can be thought of as a variation on a landscape painting, evoking a particular environment. It is also a kind of group portrait, evoking the people whose notices appear on the board.

The people speak in diverse registers and for a range of reasons, from the prosaic to the personal. Most of the notices are in Spanish, reflecting the Mexican and other Latin American populations of Los Angeles and Southern California. Connor has noted that there are ‘sometimes saccharine and sometimes existential reflections’ at play in the notice boards. In Community Notice Board (Celeste Coin Laundry), someone is renting a room only to ‘responsible people without vices’. Another teaches waltzes for ‘quinceañeras’ (the equivalent of ‘sweet sixteens’ in various Latin American cultures). A man, again ‘without vices’, seeks a woman for a serious or friendly relationship.

The cosmopolitanism of Los Angeles is evoked but so are the politics of migration and identity that are presently at the heart of political discourse and political fragmentation in the United States. These issues of course have parallels in Aotearoa. The demographics and frictions here are different but not unrelated; they bear a family resemblance. Produced by an artist who retains strong connections to Aotearoa, Community Notice Board (Celeste Coin Laundry) also evokes the economic and cultural ties that bind this country and California, drawing attention to a rich community to which we are tethered—whether or not we know it.