£10,000.00
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Gareth McConnell’s Dream Meadow II exists in a heightened realm where color, light, and texture dissolve into a euphoric haze. Saturated in hallucinatory hues, the image pulsates with the afterglow of rave culture—an echo of the phosphorescent trails left by nightclub strobes, of bodies dissolving into music and movement. Alistair O’Neil, writing in Aperture magazine, likens McConnell’s palette to the distilled essence of late 20th-century youth culture, recalling the blurred ecstasy of Dave Swindells’s 1990s club photography or the chemically altered tones of Andy Bettles’s The Face editorials.
Here, McConnell’s photographic language abandons traditional documentary clarity, embracing an aesthetic closer to dream logic—an evolution Brad Feuerhelm links to the psychedelic mysticism of Brion Gysin and Kenneth Anger. With Dream Meadow II, McConnell continues his shift towards abstraction, where form gives way to pure sensation. The flowers, luminous and untethered, seem to float within the frame, untamed and electric. Like Derek Jarman’s The Garden (1990), where nocturnal blooms shimmer in Super-8 glow, McConnell’s meadow offers a vision of beauty that is fleeting, ungraspable, and deeply intoxicating.
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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’Neil, Aperture
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It would be remiss of me not to mention the cool psychedelia that pervades McConnell’s work over the past decade. He has gone from using the techniques of a perhaps more salutary “documentary” style and has slowly loosened his grip on those austere technicalities to assume a lack of control in focus, shutter etc. which promotes a much more free and transcendent vision, not without allegory to Brion Gysin, Kenneth Anger and perhaps the musical interludes of Psychick Youth. In suggesting this, I am suggesting a consistency in McConnell’s mid-career that is inspiring.’
Brad Feuerhelm, AmericanSuburbX