Michael Assiff: USA Flowers

This exhibition continues Assiff’s investigation of the American landscape and the increasingly indistinct boundary between natural and industrial environments. The relief 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,” 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.

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, who is an entrepreneur and creative figure in his own right, 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. 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.