£500.00
_________
One available at this price
_________
'There is a cultish pandering involved that implores a state of colorful mysticism and regulates against the cold and rampant imagery being pumped out of the academies at present. Gareth is a magician to some degree, an 8th degree master of the church of psychedelic abstraction and I consider his invocations as praise-worthy. I am reminded historically of a lens magician named William Mortensen whose work functioned through cinematic pictorialism with an emphasis that oscillated between the grand and the grotesque – a chemical halo of an auratic Los Angeles situated stage left at an imagined Grand Guignol. Though Gareth’s work is not grotesque by means, it does carry about it an air of paganism and a devotion to alternatives. The Dream Meadow is one of his finest works to date and I count myself as a follower.'
Brad Feuerhelm | American Suburbs X
_________
'Gareth McConnell’s photographs of his bed and flowers have to be understood with his other work in mind. The motivation and poignance behind the images in Meditations (2004–08), Night Flowers (2002–10), make little sense if you don’t know McConnell’s shocking and affective images in the series Anti-Social Behaviour Parts I & II (1995) — victims of paramilitary punishment beatings in his homeland of Northern Ireland, or IV drug users who were his friends and sometime community. This is true of beautiful things, isn’t it? Beauty is cloying and saccharine when it’s too easily granted.'
Alison Green
_________
BTW… this one is an outtake from a commission for Parfums Dior shot in the rose gardens at The Château de La Colle Noire, Christian Dior’s former residence in the south of France.