‘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 Suburb X
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‘All of McConnell’s photographs articulate the isolation of the individual in the midst of mass communion. They persistently ask, What happens to the self in the collective will to enter the utopian space of the fantastic? McConnell describes it as “the delirious but bittersweet pleasure of losing oneself to hedonism from the view of someone who saw it from within.” These images suggest that the utopian urge is illusory, a phantasmagoria that flashes past the eyes as the hit reaches the brain.’
Alaistair O’Neil, Aperture
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