Galleries, Miami
Michael Assiff
Yard Flowers
KDR305KDR305 presents, Yard Flowers a solo exhibition of new paintings by Michael Assiff. Yard Flowers is a presentation of paintings further investigating Assiff’s interests in weeds, lawn aesthetics, and interior design colorways. The painted lawnscapes of centipedegrass and Bermudagrass are made up of hundreds of individual blades of grass, each produced by extruding methacrylic through shaped dies, which are assembled onto the canvas and doused with a coating of latex paint. The colors are sourced from the 2022 Pantone Home + Interiors color trend report (a document that serendipitously references a 2016 painting from the artist's own Hyperaccumulator series). The resulting monochrome compositions resemble color swatch paint chips. Timescales are important in this work: the quick-growing grass and the of-the-moment trend reports play against the longer timescales of the weeds’ long-term evolution amidst continual human intervention. The hand-sculpted insects represent time-lapsed depictions of the many critters that traverse and inhabit the landscapes, like June bugs, wasps, fireflies, and pill bugs. Yard Flowers at KDR305, located in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami, is an exhibition that engages with the local subtropical landscape invaded by turfgrass lawns - a landscape that is very much familiar to the Florida-born artist. The paintings’ blended ecosystems collapse the world of chemically maintained lawn systems, exterior house paint, and the weeds and insects that persist within it. The paintings in Yard Flowers contain evidence of their cultivation and taming - Assiff "mows" the blades of grass around the edges of the paintings to create an even border - as well as trace histories of the landscape they seek to represent. Michael Assiff (B. 1983, St. Petersburg, Florida) has had solo exhibitions at Ashes/Ashes (New York, NY); Valentin (Paris, France); Galería Mascota (Mexico City, Mexico); First Continent (Baltimore, MD); Shoot the Lobster (New York, NY); Good Weather (North Little Rock, AK). His work has been included in group exhibitions at Ashes/Ashes (New York, NY); Matthew Brown Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Jack Hanley Gallery (New York, NY); Martos Gallery (New York, NY); Galerie Balice Hertling (Paris, France). Assiff lives and works in Queens, New York.