£1,500.00
_____
Gareth McConnell’s Dream Meadow series reimagines the floral still life through a lens of psychedelia and transcendence. In art history, flowers have long been symbols of beauty and decay, from the vanitas paintings of the Dutch Golden Age—where lush bouquets stood as memento mori—to Georgia O’Keeffe’s sensual, oversized blossoms, vibrating with life and ambiguity. McConnell extends this lineage into the electric glow of contemporary culture, fusing the botanical with the visual language of raves, religious iconography, and the euphoric disarray of memory.
Rather than capturing flowers as static objects, McConnell’s images dissolve them into pure sensation. Long exposures and controlled movement cause petals to blur and vibrate, as if caught in a perpetual state of becoming. Their hyper-saturated hues pulse like club lights refracted through a haze of sweat and euphoria, echoing the fleeting, altered states of late 20th-century youth culture. Yet, beneath their radiance lies a shadow of disorder—flowers as symbols of sectarian divisions, of addiction, of transience. In his world, petals bloom like blood dispersing in a syringe, and beauty teeters on the edge of oblivion.
Like Andy Warhol’s Flowers series, which transformed the simple hibiscus into an emblem of pop-cultural beauty and mass production, McConnell’s images hover between the seductive and the sinister. His flowers are not just botanical specimens but vessels of history, identity, and desire—blooming, bleeding, and fading in an intoxicating rush of color and light.
_____
‘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
‘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