Gareth McConnell

The many flowers planted in municipal spaces – outside libraries, banks, office buildings and in church yards – are there for the shared enjoyment of the public, yet are mostly overlooked and their myriad beauty goes unnoticed. This is even more so at night when their visibility drops to a level of non-existence. Taken during repeated, nocturnal wanderings, Gareth McConnell’s ‘Night Flowers’ rediscover this disregarded world. Using only available light provided by street lamps, his photographs necessitate long exposures, extending the photographic moment and capturing a passage of time, which gives them an intense, almost cinematic quality. While flowers in art have historically been associated with the fleeting, fragility of life, taking up centre stage in Nature Morte artworks, McConnell’s photographic epiphanies have more in common with the energy-charged paintings of Van Gogh or the hallucinatory heightened perception found in the flower paintings of Lovis Corinth.

McConnell’s ‘Community Meeting Rooms’ series, taken in New York and London, depict the interior spaces of sparse, depersonalised, functional rooms. Everyday these neutral spaces, provided by churches, community centres and other social institutions, play host to choir groups, religious discussion forums, 12 Step meetings, exercise and yoga clubs, and more. McConnell’s photographs of the unglamorous rooms where these events occur are of places of hope and purpose, providing the kind of anonymous services usually regarded as too sincere to be remarked.

McConnell has also made a successive series of simple but highly eloquent portraits of figures whose lives can border on the extreme, such as his powerful portraits of loyalists in the Albert Bar in his hometown of Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, intravenous drug users, patrons of a local boxing gym and the young homeless living in institutions. In the exhibition at Counter Gallery, McConnell will show number of portraits from the ‘Ibiza’ series – an exotic community of young ex-pats who have converged on the holiday island in search of drug-enhanced transcendence and shared communion.