£600.00
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Gareth McConnell’s Presence series captures bodies suspended in a state of uncertainty—bleached by light, arms raised in gestures that hover between surrender and exaltation. The figures seem caught in a moment beyond time, weightless, their hands reaching toward something unseen. Is this an act of devotion, abandonment, or something more unknowable? The ambiguity lingers, the body both exposed and transcendent, vulnerable yet radiant.
The raised arms evoke a long history of gesture—at once recalling the supplicant, the celebrant, the condemned. The cruciform echoes subtly, but without resolution. There is no clear narrative, no fixed meaning—only the stark contrast of blinding brightness and encroaching darkness. The body, emptied of definition, becomes a vessel for projection, a fleeting apparition on the edge of disappearance.
Light in McConnell’s work is both revelation and erasure. The overexposed bodies appear weightless, as if dissolving into their surroundings, while the void presses in at the edges, a darkness that feels just as consuming as the light. This tension—between presence and absence, rapture and fragility—imbues the images with a quiet unease.
In these works, we are left hovering alongside the figures, held in the space between ascension and oblivion. The raised hands do not offer answers, only the silent question of what comes next.
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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, American Suburb X