The Valley is pleased to present Supply Chain Flowers, a solo exhibition of new works by Michael Assiff.

Assiff is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice engages a range of materials to survey environments impacted by human development and industry. Over the past decade, Assiff has developed a process of making low-relief paintings using methacrylic plastic, modified squeeze bottles, and poured liquid latex. In addition to paintings on canvas, he has applied this low-relief process onto surfaces such as space heaters, refrigerators, rat poison bait stations, bicycle tire treads, and electrical conduits; often altering the exhibition space itself.

Typically, Assiff creates bodies of work by exploring a specific landscape, working to recapitulate its history and ecological signature through research, observation, and meticulous biomimicry. For Assiff, ecology is a lens through which to engage the central struggles of the Anthropocene epoch – climate change, war, migration, colonialism, environmental racism, extractivism, attitudes toward non-human living things, and the ever-looming threat of doomsday.

The landscapes depicted in Supply Chain Flowers were observed and recorded over the course of several recent cross-country research trips along the interstate highway system. The resulting paintings, synthesized geographic vignettes, highlight the ubiquity of the structures created to connect the flow of commerce across America and their imposition on the natural environment. In this body of work, Assiff asks viewers to consider scale. The bigness of mechanisms located on the periphery which facilitate the excess of our consumption. The smallness of a chicory bloom set against a sky filled with wind turbines.  

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My last body of work, exhibited under the title Volunteer Flowers, explored the world of weeds throughout New York City, with special attention paid to the 200+ acres of All Faiths Cemetery in Maspeth, Queens. This graveyard, housing the remains of the Trump clan, had entered a sublime re-wilded state due to the corruption and neglect of a father and son NYPD cop duo at the helm of the cemetery’s board of directors. Taking regular expeditions into this special ecological zone, I began acting as an amateur botanist. Identifying, drawing, foraging, and making essential oils out of the plant life I found there, and ultimately, painting them.

In Supply Chain Flowers I sought to expand my sample size from the ecology of New York City to that of the greater United States via its supply chains. I have been taking research trips with a long-haul trucker, living in the cab alongside him and making photographs, videos, and drawings of the weeds I encounter along his routes. The flow of commercial materials became the territory in which to map a provisional botany, spanning many thousands of miles and microclimates. In addition to the weeds, built infrastructure and human detritus became a player in these artworks: soy, Queen Anne’s lace, horseweed, fleabane, ants, pinklady, grasses, parasitoid wasp, dragonfly, bees, whorled milkweed, chicory, common tansy, and curly dock can be found living alongside and within center-pivot irrigation systems, parking lots, buried pipelines, applied pesticide areas, oil refineries, contrails, power lines, truck tires, gas stations, wind turbines, crop dusters, and drones.

While attempting to syncretize a contemporary American landscape painting, I engaged with other periods of art history wherein artists were confronted with the impact of rampant industrialism on the natural world. Alexandre Hogue (b. 1898, Memphis, Missouri) was considered one the first “eco-critical” artists of his cohort. He set a path apart from the so-called Regionalist painters employed by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. Painting the mechanized destruction of Midwest farmlands during the Dust Bowl, he explicitly portrayed modern farm tools and practices as the cause of erosion and drought. While his peers were painting bountiful pastorals with farmers using old-timey hand tools, Hogue’s volumetric, solid painting style presented the material conditions of the time—an environmental depression preceding an economic one.

I found a seemingly antithetical motivation in the artworks which came out of the Cultural Revolution in China, in the late 1960s. Traditional ways that artists depicted sublime nature were retrofitted to exalt the power of the industrializing Communist State. Painting and ceramics that had been festooned with cliffs and craggy trees now were required to contain dams, mines, and batteries along with plenty of red flags. I love how the artists’ hand, trained to catch the wild movements of nature, handled this new inert industrial subject matter.

Neither a celebration nor a cautionary tale, I want the paintings in Supply Chain Flowers to render the ecology of the central corridors of the United States exactly how they are. The flexed might of this country’s military/industrial/agricultural core and the necrotic flesh of choked private property.

The contemporary American landscape painting I am proposing requires solidity–a cladded opacity that yields its reinforced surface only to blunt physical trauma. This type of painting is not ethereal or energetically whimsical. It does not contain the soft ecological hum of dabbled impressionism. It is a landscape painting derived from stacking, piling, hoarding, and processing. It is pressure-fit onto the picture plane. It is oversized, engorged, and dialed to the maximum capacity of a swollen, corn-fed empire.  

✿ Text by Michael Assiff