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As I waited under a tree one night
Waiting being the operative
Waiting waiting always waiting
And this fella he says to me
What about these meetings then
And I say yeah they good
But there is an exquisite beauty in
The pain of all this
Like stinging sex blossom
(To paraphrase the famous one
Patron saint of)
That cannot be underestimated
And when you there you really there
And it really is
Another world
And you wonder will you ever walk with
Normal folk again
Or if you even
Want to
And as you look up at the blossom overhead
A little flicker in the chest
The big joke
I always loved the flower burst
The rose in the stem
Life and death in one
That beautiful signal of success
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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