________________ Forest FayreAndTunch is out to lunchLaughterMore laughterWe are moving too fastNo way outMushroom wineOmmmz Red DragonsHotknives in curling tongsMatt and Pat in the back seatBeautiful Pat, long dead nowAnd I still miss you my brotherSitting on the hillValley far belowClouds churning pastThat couple dancingLike royalty in exileA naked golden man rides by on white horseNo one bats an eyeThe earth thumpsThose beautiful people dancingInsideThe ring of fireMaybeThey foundTheir hearts desire ‘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
