Community Meeting Rooms | GARETH McCONNELL

Hope dances in sharp, painful places — on a knife’s edge, or on the point of a needle. To hope is a ritualistic act (think of crossing your fingers, or hanging a wish upon a star), and one that has its temples, although these are sometimes hard to identify. At first glance, the interiors depicted in Gareth McConnell’s series Community Meeting Rooms have a careworn shabbiness, but this is belied by the acts of caring that take place within their walls. These rooms are where people act out relationships that, unusually, are not mediated by capital, or by the swerve-eyed individualism of city living. Their emptiness (as pregnant with promise as an empty dance floor) speaks of multifarious uses – the traffic of hobbyists, activists, and those seeking physical and metaphysical rehabilitation, that passes through their doors. The ‘Community’ McConnell speaks of in the series’ title is defined by the aggregation of the activities that take place in these rooms — an acephalous society where benign anarchy is the norm, and the connection between one person and another is latitudinal, like one hand grasping another. What we see in McConnell’s series is the breakdown of the Enlightenment idea of the ‘body politic’ (with all the head-to-toe hierarchies it implies) into multiple groups that happily inhabit the same space. This, it seems to me, is intimately connected with the breakdown and subsequent rebuilding of the human body that many of the activities that take place in these rooms (from keep-fit classes to meetings of local environmentalist networks) are concerned with. One might imagine the scabbed and track-marked smack addicts from McConnell’s 1995 series Anti-Social Behaviour fetching up in one of these cheaply carpeted spaces, where, under the auspices of Narcotics Anonymous, they pledge to make tomorrow a better day. We might, then, think of these meeting rooms as utopian spaces, each a seedbed for a new world, and McConnell’s photographs of them not as documentary images, but rather as talismans of something a lot like hope.

— Tom Morton

Full piece can be downloaded from selected texts

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Rio Danubio 39, Mexico City, 2007

Hope dances in sharp, painful places — on a knife’s edge, or on the point of a needle. To hope is a ritualistic act (think of crossing your fingers, or hanging a wish upon a star), and one that has its temples, although these are sometimes hard to identify. At first glance, the interiors depicted in Gareth McConnell’s series Community Meeting Rooms have a careworn shabbiness, but this is belied by the acts of caring that take place within their walls. These rooms are where people act out relationships that, unusually, are not mediated by capital, or by the swerve-eyed individualism of city living. Their emptiness (as pregnant with promise as an empty dance floor) speaks of multifarious uses – the traffic of hobbyists, activists, and those seeking physical and metaphysical rehabilitation, that passes through their doors. The ‘Community’ McConnell speaks of in the series’ title is defined by the aggregation of the activities that take place in these rooms — an acephalous society where benign anarchy is the norm, and the connection between one person and another is latitudinal, like one hand grasping another. What we see in McConnell’s series is the breakdown of the Enlightenment idea of the ‘body politic’ (with all the head-to-toe hierarchies it implies) into multiple groups that happily inhabit the same space. This, it seems to me, is intimately connected with the breakdown and subsequent rebuilding of the human body that many of the activities that take place in these rooms (from keep-fit classes to meetings of local environmentalist networks) are concerned with. One might imagine the scabbed and track-marked smack addicts from McConnell’s 1995 series Anti-Social Behaviour fetching up in one of these cheaply carpeted spaces, where, under the auspices of Narcotics Anonymous, they pledge to make tomorrow a better day. We might, then, think of these meeting rooms as utopian spaces, each a seedbed for a new world, and McConnell’s photographs of them not as documentary images, but rather as talismans of something a lot like hope.

— Tom Morton

Full piece can be downloaded from selected texts

close

Fourth Universalists Society, New York, 2005

Hope dances in sharp, painful places — on a knife’s edge, or on the point of a needle. To hope is a ritualistic act (think of crossing your fingers, or hanging a wish upon a star), and one that has its temples, although these are sometimes hard to identify. At first glance, the interiors depicted in Gareth McConnell’s series Community Meeting Rooms have a careworn shabbiness, but this is belied by the acts of caring that take place within their walls. These rooms are where people act out relationships that, unusually, are not mediated by capital, or by the swerve-eyed individualism of city living. Their emptiness (as pregnant with promise as an empty dance floor) speaks of multifarious uses – the traffic of hobbyists, activists, and those seeking physical and metaphysical rehabilitation, that passes through their doors. The ‘Community’ McConnell speaks of in the series’ title is defined by the aggregation of the activities that take place in these rooms — an acephalous society where benign anarchy is the norm, and the connection between one person and another is latitudinal, like one hand grasping another. What we see in McConnell’s series is the breakdown of the Enlightenment idea of the ‘body politic’ (with all the head-to-toe hierarchies it implies) into multiple groups that happily inhabit the same space. This, it seems to me, is intimately connected with the breakdown and subsequent rebuilding of the human body that many of the activities that take place in these rooms (from keep-fit classes to meetings of local environmentalist networks) are concerned with. One might imagine the scabbed and track-marked smack addicts from McConnell’s 1995 series Anti-Social Behaviour fetching up in one of these cheaply carpeted spaces, where, under the auspices of Narcotics Anonymous, they pledge to make tomorrow a better day. We might, then, think of these meeting rooms as utopian spaces, each a seedbed for a new world, and McConnell’s photographs of them not as documentary images, but rather as talismans of something a lot like hope.

— Tom Morton

Full piece can be downloaded from selected texts

close

Jewish Community of Japan, Tokyo, 2007

Hope dances in sharp, painful places — on a knife’s edge, or on the point of a needle. To hope is a ritualistic act (think of crossing your fingers, or hanging a wish upon a star), and one that has its temples, although these are sometimes hard to identify. At first glance, the interiors depicted in Gareth McConnell’s series Community Meeting Rooms have a careworn shabbiness, but this is belied by the acts of caring that take place within their walls. These rooms are where people act out relationships that, unusually, are not mediated by capital, or by the swerve-eyed individualism of city living. Their emptiness (as pregnant with promise as an empty dance floor) speaks of multifarious uses – the traffic of hobbyists, activists, and those seeking physical and metaphysical rehabilitation, that passes through their doors. The ‘Community’ McConnell speaks of in the series’ title is defined by the aggregation of the activities that take place in these rooms — an acephalous society where benign anarchy is the norm, and the connection between one person and another is latitudinal, like one hand grasping another. What we see in McConnell’s series is the breakdown of the Enlightenment idea of the ‘body politic’ (with all the head-to-toe hierarchies it implies) into multiple groups that happily inhabit the same space. This, it seems to me, is intimately connected with the breakdown and subsequent rebuilding of the human body that many of the activities that take place in these rooms (from keep-fit classes to meetings of local environmentalist networks) are concerned with. One might imagine the scabbed and track-marked smack addicts from McConnell’s 1995 series Anti-Social Behaviour fetching up in one of these cheaply carpeted spaces, where, under the auspices of Narcotics Anonymous, they pledge to make tomorrow a better day. We might, then, think of these meeting rooms as utopian spaces, each a seedbed for a new world, and McConnell’s photographs of them not as documentary images, but rather as talismans of something a lot like hope.

— Tom Morton

Full piece can be downloaded from selected texts

close

St Vincents Community Centre, London, 2004

Hope dances in sharp, painful places — on a knife’s edge, or on the point of a needle. To hope is a ritualistic act (think of crossing your fingers, or hanging a wish upon a star), and one that has its temples, although these are sometimes hard to identify. At first glance, the interiors depicted in Gareth McConnell’s series Community Meeting Rooms have a careworn shabbiness, but this is belied by the acts of caring that take place within their walls. These rooms are where people act out relationships that, unusually, are not mediated by capital, or by the swerve-eyed individualism of city living. Their emptiness (as pregnant with promise as an empty dance floor) speaks of multifarious uses – the traffic of hobbyists, activists, and those seeking physical and metaphysical rehabilitation, that passes through their doors. The ‘Community’ McConnell speaks of in the series’ title is defined by the aggregation of the activities that take place in these rooms — an acephalous society where benign anarchy is the norm, and the connection between one person and another is latitudinal, like one hand grasping another. What we see in McConnell’s series is the breakdown of the Enlightenment idea of the ‘body politic’ (with all the head-to-toe hierarchies it implies) into multiple groups that happily inhabit the same space. This, it seems to me, is intimately connected with the breakdown and subsequent rebuilding of the human body that many of the activities that take place in these rooms (from keep-fit classes to meetings of local environmentalist networks) are concerned with. One might imagine the scabbed and track-marked smack addicts from McConnell’s 1995 series Anti-Social Behaviour fetching up in one of these cheaply carpeted spaces, where, under the auspices of Narcotics Anonymous, they pledge to make tomorrow a better day. We might, then, think of these meeting rooms as utopian spaces, each a seedbed for a new world, and McConnell’s photographs of them not as documentary images, but rather as talismans of something a lot like hope.

— Tom Morton

Full piece can be downloaded from selected texts

close

Manly Library, Sydney, 2010

Hope dances in sharp, painful places — on a knife’s edge, or on the point of a needle. To hope is a ritualistic act (think of crossing your fingers, or hanging a wish upon a star), and one that has its temples, although these are sometimes hard to identify. At first glance, the interiors depicted in Gareth McConnell’s series Community Meeting Rooms have a careworn shabbiness, but this is belied by the acts of caring that take place within their walls. These rooms are where people act out relationships that, unusually, are not mediated by capital, or by the swerve-eyed individualism of city living. Their emptiness (as pregnant with promise as an empty dance floor) speaks of multifarious uses – the traffic of hobbyists, activists, and those seeking physical and metaphysical rehabilitation, that passes through their doors. The ‘Community’ McConnell speaks of in the series’ title is defined by the aggregation of the activities that take place in these rooms — an acephalous society where benign anarchy is the norm, and the connection between one person and another is latitudinal, like one hand grasping another. What we see in McConnell’s series is the breakdown of the Enlightenment idea of the ‘body politic’ (with all the head-to-toe hierarchies it implies) into multiple groups that happily inhabit the same space. This, it seems to me, is intimately connected with the breakdown and subsequent rebuilding of the human body that many of the activities that take place in these rooms (from keep-fit classes to meetings of local environmentalist networks) are concerned with. One might imagine the scabbed and track-marked smack addicts from McConnell’s 1995 series Anti-Social Behaviour fetching up in one of these cheaply carpeted spaces, where, under the auspices of Narcotics Anonymous, they pledge to make tomorrow a better day. We might, then, think of these meeting rooms as utopian spaces, each a seedbed for a new world, and McConnell’s photographs of them not as documentary images, but rather as talismans of something a lot like hope.

— Tom Morton

Full piece can be downloaded from selected texts

close

Narcotics Anonymous Room, Mexico City, 2007

Hope dances in sharp, painful places — on a knife’s edge, or on the point of a needle. To hope is a ritualistic act (think of crossing your fingers, or hanging a wish upon a star), and one that has its temples, although these are sometimes hard to identify. At first glance, the interiors depicted in Gareth McConnell’s series Community Meeting Rooms have a careworn shabbiness, but this is belied by the acts of caring that take place within their walls. These rooms are where people act out relationships that, unusually, are not mediated by capital, or by the swerve-eyed individualism of city living. Their emptiness (as pregnant with promise as an empty dance floor) speaks of multifarious uses – the traffic of hobbyists, activists, and those seeking physical and metaphysical rehabilitation, that passes through their doors. The ‘Community’ McConnell speaks of in the series’ title is defined by the aggregation of the activities that take place in these rooms — an acephalous society where benign anarchy is the norm, and the connection between one person and another is latitudinal, like one hand grasping another. What we see in McConnell’s series is the breakdown of the Enlightenment idea of the ‘body politic’ (with all the head-to-toe hierarchies it implies) into multiple groups that happily inhabit the same space. This, it seems to me, is intimately connected with the breakdown and subsequent rebuilding of the human body that many of the activities that take place in these rooms (from keep-fit classes to meetings of local environmentalist networks) are concerned with. One might imagine the scabbed and track-marked smack addicts from McConnell’s 1995 series Anti-Social Behaviour fetching up in one of these cheaply carpeted spaces, where, under the auspices of Narcotics Anonymous, they pledge to make tomorrow a better day. We might, then, think of these meeting rooms as utopian spaces, each a seedbed for a new world, and McConnell’s photographs of them not as documentary images, but rather as talismans of something a lot like hope.

— Tom Morton

Full piece can be downloaded from selected texts

close

Gay Mens Health Crisis, New York, 2005

Hope dances in sharp, painful places — on a knife’s edge, or on the point of a needle. To hope is a ritualistic act (think of crossing your fingers, or hanging a wish upon a star), and one that has its temples, although these are sometimes hard to identify. At first glance, the interiors depicted in Gareth McConnell’s series Community Meeting Rooms have a careworn shabbiness, but this is belied by the acts of caring that take place within their walls. These rooms are where people act out relationships that, unusually, are not mediated by capital, or by the swerve-eyed individualism of city living. Their emptiness (as pregnant with promise as an empty dance floor) speaks of multifarious uses – the traffic of hobbyists, activists, and those seeking physical and metaphysical rehabilitation, that passes through their doors. The ‘Community’ McConnell speaks of in the series’ title is defined by the aggregation of the activities that take place in these rooms — an acephalous society where benign anarchy is the norm, and the connection between one person and another is latitudinal, like one hand grasping another. What we see in McConnell’s series is the breakdown of the Enlightenment idea of the ‘body politic’ (with all the head-to-toe hierarchies it implies) into multiple groups that happily inhabit the same space. This, it seems to me, is intimately connected with the breakdown and subsequent rebuilding of the human body that many of the activities that take place in these rooms (from keep-fit classes to meetings of local environmentalist networks) are concerned with. One might imagine the scabbed and track-marked smack addicts from McConnell’s 1995 series Anti-Social Behaviour fetching up in one of these cheaply carpeted spaces, where, under the auspices of Narcotics Anonymous, they pledge to make tomorrow a better day. We might, then, think of these meeting rooms as utopian spaces, each a seedbed for a new world, and McConnell’s photographs of them not as documentary images, but rather as talismans of something a lot like hope.

— Tom Morton

Full piece can be downloaded from selected texts

close

The Den, St Helens Church, London, 2004

Hope dances in sharp, painful places — on a knife’s edge, or on the point of a needle. To hope is a ritualistic act (think of crossing your fingers, or hanging a wish upon a star), and one that has its temples, although these are sometimes hard to identify. At first glance, the interiors depicted in Gareth McConnell’s series Community Meeting Rooms have a careworn shabbiness, but this is belied by the acts of caring that take place within their walls. These rooms are where people act out relationships that, unusually, are not mediated by capital, or by the swerve-eyed individualism of city living. Their emptiness (as pregnant with promise as an empty dance floor) speaks of multifarious uses – the traffic of hobbyists, activists, and those seeking physical and metaphysical rehabilitation, that passes through their doors. The ‘Community’ McConnell speaks of in the series’ title is defined by the aggregation of the activities that take place in these rooms — an acephalous society where benign anarchy is the norm, and the connection between one person and another is latitudinal, like one hand grasping another. What we see in McConnell’s series is the breakdown of the Enlightenment idea of the ‘body politic’ (with all the head-to-toe hierarchies it implies) into multiple groups that happily inhabit the same space. This, it seems to me, is intimately connected with the breakdown and subsequent rebuilding of the human body that many of the activities that take place in these rooms (from keep-fit classes to meetings of local environmentalist networks) are concerned with. One might imagine the scabbed and track-marked smack addicts from McConnell’s 1995 series Anti-Social Behaviour fetching up in one of these cheaply carpeted spaces, where, under the auspices of Narcotics Anonymous, they pledge to make tomorrow a better day. We might, then, think of these meeting rooms as utopian spaces, each a seedbed for a new world, and McConnell’s photographs of them not as documentary images, but rather as talismans of something a lot like hope.

— Tom Morton

Full piece can be downloaded from selected texts

close

Victory Centre, Tokyo, 2007

Hope dances in sharp, painful places — on a knife’s edge, or on the point of a needle. To hope is a ritualistic act (think of crossing your fingers, or hanging a wish upon a star), and one that has its temples, although these are sometimes hard to identify. At first glance, the interiors depicted in Gareth McConnell’s series Community Meeting Rooms have a careworn shabbiness, but this is belied by the acts of caring that take place within their walls. These rooms are where people act out relationships that, unusually, are not mediated by capital, or by the swerve-eyed individualism of city living. Their emptiness (as pregnant with promise as an empty dance floor) speaks of multifarious uses – the traffic of hobbyists, activists, and those seeking physical and metaphysical rehabilitation, that passes through their doors. The ‘Community’ McConnell speaks of in the series’ title is defined by the aggregation of the activities that take place in these rooms — an acephalous society where benign anarchy is the norm, and the connection between one person and another is latitudinal, like one hand grasping another. What we see in McConnell’s series is the breakdown of the Enlightenment idea of the ‘body politic’ (with all the head-to-toe hierarchies it implies) into multiple groups that happily inhabit the same space. This, it seems to me, is intimately connected with the breakdown and subsequent rebuilding of the human body that many of the activities that take place in these rooms (from keep-fit classes to meetings of local environmentalist networks) are concerned with. One might imagine the scabbed and track-marked smack addicts from McConnell’s 1995 series Anti-Social Behaviour fetching up in one of these cheaply carpeted spaces, where, under the auspices of Narcotics Anonymous, they pledge to make tomorrow a better day. We might, then, think of these meeting rooms as utopian spaces, each a seedbed for a new world, and McConnell’s photographs of them not as documentary images, but rather as talismans of something a lot like hope.

— Tom Morton

Full piece can be downloaded from selected texts

close

Bishop Perry Moore Hall, New York, 2005