£200.00
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Two available at this price
Numbers 04/23 and 05/23
£250 and up thereafter
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‘…bears his unmistakable imprint: vivid colours, atmospheric lighting and the creative use of blur and movement. Eschewing digital post-production techniques, McConnell achieves his heightened images when shooting, through the deft manipulation of light, movement and long exposures.’
Sean O’Hagan, The Observer
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with an artist: a mind not starving/hysterical/naked destroyed by alcohol and drugs, violent sectarianism, sarcasm, or lurid gummy sweets, but who practices an intense ardour – a rapture with the city and its urban plant life, including the city’s fine florists whose high raptures with the floral make visible an ecstasy . . . a light show of psychotropic incandescence, multi-coloured, intravenous inks, delirious registration slippages, whose flower perfume dominates the residual Charles Manson faecal smell in the flower soil, or the daintily rotten, discoloured water
(folk culture and rural traditions have traditionally assigned symbolic meaning to flowers, such as Gardenia meaning: Ecstasy (MDMA)/Acid House and Rave/objective quantitative colour information of MDMA using visible hyper-spectral imaging/florid red faced from dancing/water intoxication/cerebral oedema)
Neal Brown, 2021
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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
Brad Feuerhelm, AmericanSuburbX