Supply Chain Flowers at The Valley

Supply Chain Flowers
The Valley
203 Ledoux Street
Taos, NM 87571
5/18/24 – 6/29/24

My last body of work, exhibited under the title Volunteer Flowers, explored the world of weeds throughout New York City. 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.

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

Installation view of Supply Chain Flowers at The Valley, Taos

Untitled (Turbines, Chicory)
Latex and methacrylic on canvas
18 x 14 x 1.5"
2023

Untitled (Refinery, Parasitoid Wasps)
Latex and methacrylic on canvas
18 x 14 x 1.5"
2023

Untitled (Gas Station, Whirled Milkweed, Teasel)
Latex and methacrylic on canvas
18 x 14 x 1.5"
2024

Untitled (Center Pivot Irrigation, Crop Duster, Drone)
Latex and methacrylic on canvas
18 x 14 x 1.5"
2024

Untitled (Common Tansy, Center Pivot Irrigation)
Latex and methacrylic on canvas
18 x 14 x 1.5"
2023

Untitled (Shredded Tire, Fleabane)
Latex and methacrylic on canvas
48 x 36 x 1.5"
2023

Untitled (Parking Lot, Pinkladies)
Latex and methacrylic on canvas
48 x 36 x 1.5"
2023

Untitled (Queen Anne’s Lace, Center Pivot Irrigation)
Latex and methacrylic on canvas
48 x 36 x 1.5"
2023

Untitled (Utility Poles, Pipeline)
Latex and methacrylic on canvas
48 x 36 x 1.5"
2024

Untitled (Oil Refinery, Fleabane)
Latex and methacrylic on canvas
48 x 36 x 1.5"
2024