£400.00
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Forest Fayre
And
Tunch is out to lunch
Laughter
More laughter
We are moving too fast
No way out
Mushroom wine
Ommmz Red Dragons
Hotknives in curling tongs
Matt and Pat in the back seat
Beautiful Pat, long dead now
And I still miss you my brother
Sitting on the hill
Valley far below
Clouds churning past
That couple dancing
Like royalty in exile
A naked golden man rides by on white horse
No one bats an eye
The earth thumps
Those beautiful people dancing
Inside
The ring of fire
Maybe
They found
Their hearts desire
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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’Neill, Aperture 241, 2020