“The happiest, most productive workplace in the world.” 

Amorphous, colourful shapes congregate in this agreed upon time and space. You identify their flat, probing eyes as you enter the meeting. A kaleidoscope of knowing glances are reflected in the disco-ball balloons as they hover in anticipation. Some have been waiting longer than others; you can see it in their postures as they lean, rest or deflate into the floor. 

Late-stage capitalism has seen the blurring of work and play steered by mega-corporations like Google, where slides, balloon walls and razor scooters have become a part of the white-collar workscape. Laveen Gammie’s The Meet Up considers the selective celebration of labour, and recognizes the “workplace meeting” as a classed and racialized space of leisure afforded only to some. Through her critically playful practice, Gammie disrupts the intertwining aesthetic, affective, and political implications of the meeting as both space and ideology. With reverence for the shiny, synthetic, and garishly colourful, the material language of play becomes a sculptural strategy where familiar objects and narratives become legible in new ways. 

In foregrounding the allure of form, the works signal a politics of visuality and visibility. In Golf as Land, Gammie questions the absence of land at the meeting, particularly when it takes place upon “natural turf” maintained to a state of artificial perfection. On the golf course, the land’s presence (and thus absence) is dependent on its use-value as a groomed site of exclusive leisure, illustrative of what George Lipsitz calls the “white spatial imaginary.” By stretching the monk’s cloth backwards and exposing the loose, untrimmed yarn ends, Gammie indexes the labour upon which leisure depends. Similarly, her recursive use of green-screen-green platforms makes visible the production-stage of a fabricated reality. 

The quote which prefaced this text invokes an intriguing parallel between work and happiness. Sara Ahmed has explored how certain objects, choices, and people are associated with attaining happiness or living a “good life.” Rooted within social dynamics, normative and privileged paths including obtaining a higher education and a white-collar job are associated with the promise of happiness. In Corporate Labour Ladder and Social-Economical Ladder, unevenly spaced chrome and hot pink steps gesture heavenwards with the promise of upward mobility. 

You did it, you’ve made it to The Meet Up. Not everyone does. You clung on to that rickety, wavering ladder that was designed to only support the weight of 1. Choose your happy reward: a tiny disco ball; truck nuts. 

- Text by Dani Neira