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In 2011, Venice-based photographer Randi Malkin Steinberger produced the exquisite Boetti by Afghan People; a book based on her experience in the early nineties documenting the production of works of art designed by the noted late Italian conceptual practitioner Alighiero Boetti that were embroidered by Afghan women in refugee camps in Peshawar, Pakistan. Over the past several years she has turned her keen eye to those tented buildings we pass seemingly every day on our way to here or there. Though conspicuously clad in brightly-striped fumigation shrouds, their ubiquitousness serves as a barometer of the boom and bust cycles of the local residential real estate market that has rendered them all but invisible. Her vivid color images provide a typology of these ephemeral, quintessentially Southern Californian structures. Miranda July has written of them “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”. While awaiting the publication of her upcoming book of this work – featuring an essay by Mike Davis -, Randi Malkin Steinberger will present an installation of these photographs utilizing Arcana’s steel “Forest of Books” as a backdrop.
Additionally, Randi’s extensive collection of vernacular photography includes a box of prints from the estate of a country doctor she purchased on eBay. The original owner grew up as the son of a missionary in the Belgian Congo; living there with his parents until he came to the United States to attend college. The photographs date from the 1920s through the 1960s, and depict a lost view of Western religion and colonialism intersecting with the native peoples. Congo Mission Box is her newly-published book compiled from a selection of these images that was designed in conjunction with Book Machine at the 2015 Printed Matter LA Art Book Fair. It is available in a first printing of one hundred copies along with a deluxe edition conceived exclusively for the signing limited to twenty-one examples – each of which comes with an original vintage photograph from the Congo!
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