Post Times is pleased to present USA Flowers, an exhibition of new paintings and a video by Michael Assiff.
The exhibition continues Assiff’s investigation of the American landscape and the increasingly indistinct boundary between natural and industrial environments. The paintings depict weeds, agricultural fields, insects, highways, drainage systems, industrial sites, and other infrastructure associated with the movement of goods across the United States.
Assiff developed the works through a series of cross-country trips with his friend Courtland, a long-haul flatbed trucker. Traveling in the cab of Courtland’s semi, Assiff photographs and draws plants and their surroundings at truck stops, loading docks, gas stations, agricultural fields, and along highways. The routes of commercial freight determine the geography of the project, extending Assiff’s earlier study of New York City weeds into a provisional botany of American supply chains.
Assiff constructs each painting in low relief from extruded plastic. Working over a drawing on canvas, he applies the plastic through cake-decorating tips, pours paint over the resulting relief, sands the surface, and paints individual elements back into the composition. In the new paintings, Assiff introduces an additional process he calls a “spill,” spraying the surface with water and diluted house-paint dyes. The resulting stains evoke weathering, runoff, and chemical contamination while partially obscuring the relief image beneath.
Assiff has been developing this relief process for over a decade. He began using plastic in response to the longevity of ancient stone reliefs. Plastic offered another form of permanence: a material designed for disposability that can persist in the environment for centuries. Its use establishes a direct relationship between the paintings’ material construction and their subjects: plastic tableaus of petrocapitalist realism.
The fluorescent oranges, yellows, and greens throughout the exhibition derive partly from high-visibility workwear. Assiff relates these colors, used to distinguish workers within industrial environments, to the visible and ultraviolet coloration flowers use to attract insects. Such correspondences between biological and industrial systems describe an American landscape in which nature and infrastructure no longer appear as separate subjects.
The paintings engage a history of American landscape painting concerned with the transformation of the land through agriculture and industry. Assiff has looked particularly to Alexandre Hogue, whose solid, volumetric paintings of the Dust Bowl departed from the pastoral imagery prevalent in much American Regionalist painting of the period. Hogue depicted modern agricultural machinery alongside the erosion and drought it helped produce. Assiff’s paintings address a contemporary landscape shaped by a different forces: interstate highways, industrial agriculture, petrochemical production, warehouses, pipelines, and freight.
A video work presented on the gallery’s lower level extends the exhibition beyond the paintings. Edited from footage Assiff recorded while traveling with Courtland, the work follows the landscapes, roads, industrial sites, and intervals of daily life encountered along their routes. Courtland is himself an entrepreneur and creative figure, developing trucker fitness equipment and apparel, offering in-cab fitness coaching to fellow drivers, and building an online following around fitness and gender commentary from his perspective as a trans man in the trucking industry. These pursuits provide additional sources of income within an industry transformed by deregulation and increasingly precarious working conditions. Presented as a continuous loop, the video becomes both a record of Assiff’s travels and a portrait of Courtland, whose work and life provide the structure through which Assiff encounters the American landscape.
Neither celebration nor cautionary tale, the works in USA Flowers render the ecology of the central corridors of the United States, an industrialized agricultural landscape formed through stacking, piling, hoarding, transporting, and processing—pressure-fit onto the picture plane and dialed to the maximum capacity of a swollen, corn-fed empire.
Michael Assiff (b. 1983 in St. Petersburg, FL) lives and works in Queens, New York. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has presented solo exhibitions at Ashes/Ashes, KDR305, Shoot the Lobster, Good Weather, and others. He has been included in group exhibitions at Matthew Brown, Salon 94, Magenta Plains, Night Gallery, Galerie Mascota, Jack Barrett, Charles Moffett, Marinaro, Jack Hanley, Arsenal Contemporary, and others. His work has been written about in The New York Times, Mousse Magazine, Vice, and other publications.