Meech Boakye

Canadian-American, b. 1997, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, lives and works in Portland, OR

Meech Boakye: Black Pool Party

Aug 27 - Oct 31

Paragon Gallery at Portland Community College Cascade

705 N Killingsworth St, Portland, OR 97217

Wed: 12:00 - 5:00 PM, Thurs & Fri: 12:00 - 7:00 PM, Sat 12:00 - 5:00 PM

About the Project

Meech Boakye is a Portland-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers on collaboration with multispecies kin, including plants and fungi. For C45, Boakye presents Black Pool Party at the Paragon Gallery at PCC Cascade, a two-part installation that explores purity as a performance and considers how the body changes as it learns to be watched, recorded, touched, and transformed. A new video ranges from marble extraction in a mountain quarry to the artist being slimed in a backyard wildflower meadow, reframing the familiar children’s television trope of the “slime pour” as an experience of vulnerability, shame, and desire. In the adjoining gallery, touchable cast soap relief sculptures offer a form of aftercare, inviting viewers to consider how matter can hold memory and emotion. Sound and scent carry the installation from the locker room of an indoor pool to the garden, incorporating sensory traces that blur the boundaries between the bodily, the environmental, and the mediated.

Artist Bio

Boakye is a Canadian-American artist and writer whose relational practice spans research, sculpture, and publishing. Their objects, images, publications, and public programs often document and prompt deep engagement with landscapes, everyday materials, and multispecies beings. They hold an Honors BA in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. Internationally, their work has been exhibited at institutions and galleries including The Brick, Susan Hobbs Gallery, West Den Haag, and the Art Gallery of Guelph. As a writer, their texts have been published in C Magazine, Oregon Humanities, and The Globe & Mail. Boakye’s practice has been generously supported by the Simons Foundation's Triangle Program, the Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC), and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts through the Precipice Fund, a regranting initiative administered by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA).