The Truth and Other Stories - The Connor Brothers

The Connor Brothers returned to Jaski Gallery. We showed their exhibition The Truth and Other Stories from Saturday 12 until Sunday 27 November 2022.

It was the second time that Jaski Gallery took care of a solo show by The Connor Brothers.

The Connor Brothers is the pseudonym for British artists Mike Snelle (1976) and James Golding (1974), who met during their studies in Cambridge. Their work centres on collage as this layered, fragmented technique gives them maximum leeway to play with meaning, appropriating and transforming elements of vintage romance novels and old master paintings.

Their clever and witty pieces are steeped in references to history and to popular culture, offering an almost anthropological view of contemporary western society. Their work constitutes a humorous and often biting commentary on society’s obsession with money, beauty, fame, and our idealized visions of relationships.

The Connors Brothers initially presented themselves as American twins Franklyn and Brendan, fabricating a past in which they were raised within an extreme, pseudo-Christian cult known as The Family whose leader David Berg preached and practiced a fanatical, perverse form of Christianity. In this fiction the 16-year-old twins escape to New York, where they develop a methodology to make sense of the outside world, each exploring his surroundings and sharing his discoveries with the other through their notebooks and sketchpads.

In 2014, they came out in an article in Britains Telegraph newspaper, revealing their true identity and workplace. The latter could hardly have been more British: a studio in a converted pub next to a betting shop, on a traffic-choked street in Hackney, East London. The pair are known for their playful hoaxes, creating a fictional museum housing The Hanbury Collection, which merges truth and fiction in such a way as to render it impossible to work out which exhibits are real and which not.