Less

Two-person Exhibition of Meech Boakye & Gareth Long, February 10 – March 19, 2022
Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto
Photos by Toni Hafkenscheid.

How can a conversation be made manifest in a space?
What is a garden?

One proposition is to consider the garden a library, seeing both as a meeting place, transformative zone, shared collection, place of nourishment and system of relationships. Also, as a place of failure, stumbling, and growing.

Less is a collaborative exhibition between Meech Boakye and Gareth Long and a visualization of their shared exchanges. Together they traverse subjects as diverse as their individual art practices, food and plant histories, family, creating a culture of less over more, and myriad other thematic rabbit holes. Through conversing, challenging, and learning, they find fulfillment in the processual and travail of research, seeing this in-between space as perfectly muddy.

The relationship between objects in this exhibition is rhizomatic and presented on a modular shelf structure. In this iteration, the shelving units are not wall-mounted but rest back-to-back offering an apt analogue of how one might go about working and thinking together, sharing ideas in a mutually supportive way.

This is the Professor.
He sits at his desk and reads.
Reading is hard for him today.
He keeps dreaming of the big red fish.
The Professor thinks:
“I want to catch the big red fish
for the zoo.”
Soybean car,
Henry Ford,
Frankfurt Kitchen,
Maintenance,
Meat Wife,
Arm in Arm,
How to Kill the Fatted Calf,
Cottonseed,
Pigskin fermentation,
Housewife eats vegetable shortening,
That We May Serve,
A collecting box,
& glycerin makes explosives,
Modular design,
Structures of intimacy,
Trois Contes,
Parrot,
G,
Gustave Flaubert,
Bouvard and Pécuchet,
Gardener
Librarian
Morris Oxford III --> Hindustan Ambassador --> Fullbore Mark 10
A True History,
Trial in the Court of Vowels,
Songs of a Sourdough,
The Joy of Cooking,
Copies in Exile,
Big Red Fish,
Ricola,
A relational model of subjectivity,
A Little Ramble/Kleine Wanderung,
Display the display,
No, I will not hang butcher,
Garden hints,
Anosmia,
Komisch,
Muddiness,
Abattoir,
Over-the-shoulder reading,
Betty Bossi,
Aunt Jenny,
How to be an Ministering Angel,
Jum and Gie,

FrameWork 3/22 by Parker Kay
Essay for the collaborative project "Less" by Meech Boakye and Gareth Long, Susan Hobbs Gallery
"Less” — Gareth Long and Meech Boakye by Liam Mullen
Review in C Magazine