No Circus brings together photographs by Los Angeles–based Randi Malkin Steinberger (born 1960) of buildings tented for termite fumigation around Los Angeles. After moving to the city in the early ‘90s, she encountered these shrouded structures and began to stop and photograph them, knowing that the tent might be undraped at any given moment.
Steinberger was intrigued by the way the colors and shapes of the tents showed off the forms below and highlighted the beauty of the poor plants on the outside, still flourishing, unaware that they were slowly being poisoned. Beyond the intended purpose of fumigation, these tents unwittingly allow us to stop and contemplate not only architectural form and the meaning of home, but also the Southern California lifestyle more broadly.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Randi Malkin Steinberger: No Circus.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Miranda July
Everyone has looked twice at these big top monoliths but only Steinberger has looked again and again, transforming termite tents in to public art with her gorgeous and obsessive eye.
Hyperallergic
Claire Voon
Steinberger’s photographs capture both the playfulness and underlying unsettling feelings of these structures. Stripes of all color combinations fill the pages of her publication, the tangerine oranges, bumblebee yellows, and candy reds starkly sticking out against the greenery and flora of California.
New York Photography Diary
Sasha Patkin
At once material and imagined, fantastic and ordinary, Malkin Steinberger's No Circus opens the door to a world which is absurd in its anxiety, delightful in its dissolution, and, perhaps, already just next door.
T: The New York Times Style Magazine
Max Lakin
[A] Ruschaean portrait of the particular strangeness of Los Angeles and its suburbs... The images fit snugly in the tradition of looking at the sun-stroked Southern California landscape as an alien terrain, the same surreal sweep that Bruce Davidson encountered when he shot palm trees growing in airport parking lots.
The New York Times
Mike McPhate
The photographer Randi Malkin Steinberger captured the incongruously cheerful fumigation tents that cover buildings being treated for termites in Los Angeles.
Fast Company
Meg Miller
What may have appeared to be the first signs of some cheerfully unhinged suburban dystopia, in fact, had a much more practical explanation: the tents were covering houses being fumigated. They are a familiar sight for Angelenos, Steinberger soon found, and over the course of a decade she came across hundreds of them driving around the city. In her new book, No Circus, she collects over 60 photographs capturing the houses temporarily shrouded in colorful tarpaulin.
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Saturday, October 1, 4-6PM, photographer Randi Malkin Steinberger will sign copies of No Circus, new from Damiani, at Arcana: Books on the Arts in Culver City. Signing alongside Ms. Steinberger will be D.J. Waldie, who contributes a text to the book, and the book's designer - and Deadbeat Club head honcho - Clint Woodside. Special musical performance will be by composer Gavin Gamboa. Evoking the language of insects - both real and imagined - as well as the sounds of quarantine, Mr. Gamboa of The Teaching Machine collective will provide a backdrop of chirping, clicking, whirling, buzzing oscillations to the event! continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 7 x 9 in. / 128 pgs / 69 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $35.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $47.5 ISBN: 9788862084802 PUBLISHER: Damiani AVAILABLE: 9/27/2016 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA LA
No Circus brings together photographs by Los Angeles–based Randi Malkin Steinberger (born 1960) of buildings tented for termite fumigation around Los Angeles. After moving to the city in the early ‘90s, she encountered these shrouded structures and began to stop and photograph them, knowing that the tent might be undraped at any given moment.
Steinberger was intrigued by the way the colors and shapes of the tents showed off the forms below and highlighted the beauty of the poor plants on the outside, still flourishing, unaware that they were slowly being poisoned. Beyond the intended purpose of fumigation, these tents unwittingly allow us to stop and contemplate not only architectural form and the meaning of home, but also the Southern California lifestyle more broadly.
