September 9–October 18, 2026
“USA Flowers” is a poignant display of neo–folk art for our red-pilled times. Michael Assiff’s paintings set the stage for the memorable eclogue of his new video, where subjects such as soy allergies, suicide coils, and the Tucker Carlson Network share unstable ground.
The paintings’ low-relief surfaces recall memorial or gravestone engravings. Continuing a method developed over a decade, Assiff begins by outlining the compositions on unprimed canvas and then, in an almost slapstick compositional pivot, applies “extruded plastic” to their surfaces with cake-decorating tips. What follows is a further deconstructed (and, arguably, deindustrialized) painterly process: Assiff pours white house paint on top of the relief, sands it, and finally stains the surfaces with concentrated dyes used as commercial house paint colorant. The color palette is predominately slightly-past-expiration-date pastels—wilted peony pink, chlorine gas yellow, and nauseous cartoon green.
The pours (or, as the artist calls them, “spills”) form thick puddles, oozing to the edges of the canvases, through which the psychedelic patterns of bustling flora emerge. Among the labyrinths of vegetation, Assiff inserts I-spy moments of recognizable roadside detritus within his paint-by-numbers botanical configurations. A Starbucks logo peers through the camouflage. A crumpled Monster Energy drink can draws the eye. The various cameos of iconographic consumer waste heighten the paintings’ syntax with a grim tone that signals resignation more than repair.
The landscapes are accompanied by smaller paintings referencing US industrial enterprise and working-class culture. Some of these pieces feel more distinctly indebted to folk art Americana—cousins to CorningWare, Velvet Elvises, or saw blade paintings. Untitled (Corn) (all works 2026), an ear of corn with corncob wheels, would seem at home in a double-wide trailer kitchenette. Untitled (Trucks), a line of front-facing truck cabs, has the sensibility of auto-body shop waiting room art. Smashed bugs stuck to a truck grill in Untitled (Grill) recall dollar store stickers or Crocs Jibbitz charms. These kitsch compositions clash ominously with adjacent works presenting tangles of truck engine guts and Dow Chemical plant infrastructure.
The wacky GMO phallus of Assiff’s corncob-car meets its psychosexual twin with Untitled (Packer), depicting a latex penis prosthetic. Untitled (Packer) is the exhibition’s keystone, connecting these trashed landscapes to the main event, and the main character, of this mostly disembodied exhibition. While Assiff’s paintings are technically impressive and embedded with prodding surprises, his forty-nine-minute video Long-Haul Flowers is the highlight here. It follows Ramblin, a trucker, trans man, and old friend of Assiff, over the course of four years of ride-alongs across the continental United States.
The video is less picaresque road movie and more Frederick Wiseman, with long takes documenting Ramblin’s working life punctuated by shots of flyover country’s gnarled medians and littered parking lots. The audio components include a droning synth score, chats with Ramblin, glimpses into his life as an aspiring YouTube personality, and recorded excerpts of podcasts featuring a bizarre cast of conspiratorial talking heads.
Ramblin’s name is a polyvalent pun. It is both technically what he does for work as a long-haul trucker and the rhetorical makeup of his preferred media ecology. His disorienting positions on gender and politics, which he shares freely, are an all-too-familiar mismatch: a gallimaufry of incel talking points, toxic mindfulness, and hustlecore grindsets. Despite the dark triad adjacency, his earnestness bypasses irony-poisoning. Indeed, Assiff frames Ramblin as the US everyman of the mid-2020s. He promulgates meninist talking points to his subscribers while listening to guided meditations. He lives off grass-fed microwaved steak procured from Walmart, following the radical carnivore diet of Mikhaila Fuller (Peterson, daughter of Jordan). He exercises on the side of the road and scrolls through Instagram reels at truck stops.
Ramblin’s life and surroundings are tinged with an almost overwhelming exhaustion—from heterofatalism to the mundane supermodernity of late capitalism to the collapse of the trucking industry as a viable career—and his predilection for infotainment and self-help could be seen as escapism. However, Assiff succeeds in humanizing his subject. Ramblin is a wanderer at his core, deeply searching for meaning and stability in a damaged world.
Assiff captures what he sees with a non-inserting gaze, and crafts work that, while potentially cynical on its surface, is embedded with glimmers of reverence. The result of “USA Flowers” is a complex knot of concerns—grappling with ecocide, petrocapitalism run amok, the degradation of American labor, the splintering of any collective political compass—presented with a calm hand and a wry smile.
Hats and T-shirts made by Ramblin, as extensions of his endeavor to become an online fitness coach, accompany the video installation, hung on the opposing wall like merchandise in a flea market display. Seemingly AI-generated, the shirts’ designs feature edgy skeletons in workwear and spiky metal fonts, emblazoned with affirmative slogans like “Shiftin’ Gears & Liftin’ Iron.” They’re funny, and their inclusion feels important: they distill the video’s documentary bent into pure lowbrow capsules, artifacts equivalent to a can of Kodiak or a pair of fluorescent green truck nuts. While Ramblin’s truck speeds down the hammer lane, Assiff invites us to stop and smell the plastic flowers.
