£600.00
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Less a photograph and more a hallucination—an acid-drenched vision of cherry blossoms melting into pure light. His florals don’t sit politely in vases; they pulsate, bleed color, and flicker between beauty and something more ominous, more unhinged. The blossoms seem radioactive, their petals dissolving into a dreamstate where nature glitches, loops, and mutates.
Neal Brown, in The Meaning of Flowers, dissects how blooms are never just blooms—always standing in for something else, whether sex, decay, or ritual. Cherry blossoms, in particular, are overloaded with symbolism: in Japanese mono no aware, they are exquisite and doomed, petals dropping like tiny death scenes; in Western kitsch, they’re aestheticized into wallpaper, perfume, and café lattes. McConnell distorts these histories, warping the soft delicacy of blossoms into something chemically heightened, where the line between reverie and reality frays.
His Dream Blossom works feels less like a tribute to nature’s fleeting beauty and more like a fever dream of its digital afterlife—a flower photographed, filtered, re-processed, and reborn in hyper-color, its fragile symbolism stretched to the edge of collapse.
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'McConnell’s flowers. Coloured shadows. Slippage. De-registration. Screaming colour. Narcissistic, posturing, pop star tight-balls-trousers colours. Synaesthesia colours and intimate human perfumes. Vertiginous planes of colour as seen by the industrious bee on his or her daily commute to the flower workplace. The engorged take-me-to-bed-and-fuck-me flower colours of sex. An explosion of petals in a Northern Ireland flower stall, many people brought to violent orgasm' Neal Brown, The Meaning of Flowers, 2022 _____ ‘Gareth McConnell’s recent projects are essays in youthful bodies, saturated colors, and floral forms. They resemble stills from a cult initiation ceremony, a psychedelic clinical trial, or a nudist photography club. Their unexplained nature is countered by a calibrated use of color, as if shade and tint, not form, unlock their meaning. McConnell’s handling of color pursues the hue of rave music culture as the distillation of late twentieth -century youth culture. It grinds down all kinds of disparate imagery that captures the glittering tail of burning brightly and recalls the phosphorescent smears of disco lights across bodies. McConnell’s work recaptures the flashes of Dave Swindells’s snapshots from 1990s London nightclubs; the use of paused frames in Mark Leckey’s film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999); the intense colour of Andy Bettles’s mid-1980s cross-process fashion editorials published in The Face magazine or Mark LeBon’s double-exposure portraits for i-D magazine at the same time; the Super-8 footage of Derek Jarman’s flower beds on Dungeness Beach filmed at night in The Garden (1990).’ Alistair O’Neill, Aperture 241, 2020 _____ ‘There is a cultish pandering involved that implores a state of colorful mysticism and regulates against the cold and rampant imagery being pumped out of the academies at present. Gareth is a magician to some degree, an 8th degree master of the church of psychedelic abstraction and I consider his invocations as praise-worthy. I am reminded historically of a lens magician named William Mortensen whose work functioned through cinematic pictorialism with an emphasis that oscillated between the grand and the grotesque – a chemical halo of an auratic Los Angeles situated stage left at an imagined Grand Guignol. Though Gareth’s work is not grotesque by means, it does carry about it an air of paganism and a devotion to alternatives. The Dream Meadow is one of his finest works to date and I count myself as a follower.’ Brad Feuerhelm, American Suburbs X, 2019