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C Mag

“Less” — Gareth Long and Meech Boakye

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Meech Boakye and Gareth Long, "Anosmia/Komisch/Dummy/Dinkel" (detail), 2022, installation view from "Less," 2022, Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto

Review28 Sep 2022

“Less” joins the seemingly disparate practices of Meech Boakye and Gareth Long. An ode to the artists’ blossoming friendship, the show provides the public with insight into the evolution of their relationship, and their ongoing conversations.

Toward the front of the gallery, tall wooden uprights braced by colourful shelves hang from the ceiling. The shelves carry trinkets, books, printouts, and defunct domestic and educational tools from the ever-expanding collections of Boakye and Long. These carefully gathered, generations-old items include: a Frankfurt Kitchen spouted tin, didactic bulletins outlining grease cultivation strategies for upcycled munitions, and a vintage-dated “Pin the Tail on the Donkey.” The collection of items gestures to the kind of North American homemaking propaganda that was common during World War II. Contrasting the older items are more contemporary pieces, such as the vinegars and microbial mesocosms fostered by Boakye. Within these mesocosms, the ecological dynamics of the near past are metabolized, fermented, and burped out in effervescence. These containers host alternative ecologies of collaboration: relations that require incremental care and sustained attention to ensure that the cooperating organisms flourish independently and collectively—a motif cited throughout “Less.”

The hanging shelves furnishing “Less” can only exist through a series of supports working in tandem. Uprights lean back to back, countering the weight of each other, ridges are inlaid into the brackets and shelves, preventing them from going limp, and lengths of wooden dowel fit snugly into boreholes, fastening the fixtures together. Without the cooperation of these independent relationships, the structural integrity of the shelves would be compromised. Each piece is involved in a network of supports supporting supports, and these collaborative structures ensure that the exhibition thrives.

The shelves, broadly titled Anosmia/Komisch/Dummy/Dinkel (2022), also display offerings from Boakye and Long’s peripheral collaborators. The collection features works from Long’s child, Lucian, a painted cardboard carton, a neighbouring wall-mounted poem titled “Jum and Gee” (2022), and Susan Hobbs’s resident wooden snake. The incongruences between objects muddy any singular authorial voice. Like a conversation, the objects form a collage of voices and an enmeshment of perspectives mediated through the armature of the shelf.

Generously, “Less” makes cherished collections public. Boakye and Long challenge competitive individualism by proudly demonstrating how practitioners rely on their relations—audiences included—to flourish both collectively and independently.


“Less” by Gareth Long and Meech Boakye ran from 10 February to 19 March 2022 at Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto.

About contributors

Liam Mullen is living and working in Toronto, ON, as an artist, writer, and researcher. He constantly seeks ripe and experimental methods of transmedia knowledge translation.