£2,000.00
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Gareth McConnell’s Paramilitary II is a striking composite artwork fusing an anonymous photograph of a masked gunman firing an improvised grenade launcher with one of McConnell’s signature Dream Meadow images—lush, hallucinatory visions of wildflowers and light. This collision of violence and transcendence is at the heart of the work, embodying the contradictions of conflict, mysticism, and altered consciousness.
The image speaks to a long and uneasy history where warlords, revolutionaries, and cartels have blurred the line between political struggle and narcotic trade. From the Contras in Nicaragua to the Taliban's involvement in heroin distribution, the freedom fighter and the drug dealer have often been one and the same. This paradox—where substances that offer escape from suffering are trafficked by those who enforce suffering—manifests in the Northern Irish / North of Ireland paramilitary experience.
As art critic Neal Brown describes, Northern Irish paramilitaries function as a kind of indigenous shamanic force, wielding both sacred violence and psychoactive sacraments. Their role is simultaneously punitive and transcendental, enforcing discipline through punishment shootings while also flooding their communities with mind-expanding substances. In this dark cycle, they distribute both drugs and bullets, offering spiritual release and mortal consequence in equal measure.
McConnell’s juxtaposition of the spectral meadow with the raw brutality of the masked gunman evokes this duality—where the pursuit of altered states, be it through raves, religion, or revolutionary warfare, is never free from bloodshed. The piece nods to pre-Christian mystics, those seekers who understood that enlightenment and destruction are often two sides of the same coin. In Paramilitary II, utopia and horror are woven together, capturing the human compulsion to both dream and destroy.
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Paramilitaries:
'Paramilitaries are a kind of Northern Irish indigenous shaman, with magico-religious belief systems and powerful automatic weaponry. Paramilitaries practice as intermediaries between the human and the spirit worlds. They radically expand consciousness by issuing punishment shootings and beatings for anti-social behaviour, including for children and teenagers, and by administering powerful drugs to their communities, including the Class A ‘flower power’ drugs LSD, DMT, psilocybin, and MDMA. In a profound paradox of spiritual learning, devotees may simultaneously buy drugs, and be shot for taking them. Thus do the paramilitaries serve their communities; by dispensing drugs and spells, communicating with spirits, shooting adults and children, and escorting the dead to the afterlife.'
Neal Brown, excerpt from The Meaning Of Flowers'