Randi Malkin Steinberger

'No Circus' brings together a collection of Randi Malkin Steinberger’s photographs of buildings tented for termite fumigation around Los Angeles.

Randomly coming across these shrouded structures aroused her sense of wonder from the time she arrived in this city in the early 1990s. Whenever she spotted the colorful stripes, she pulled her car off the road to photograph them, knowing that the tent could be undraped at any moment. Intrigued by the way the colors and shapes of the tents “show off” the forms below and highlight the beauty of the poor plants on the outside, still flourishing, unaware that they are slowly being poisoned. These cloaked structures are ubiquitous in the Los Angeles landscape yet they are most often seen as a mere flash of color as one drives by. Beyond their intended purpose of fumigation, they unwittingly allow us to stop and contemplate not only architectural form and the meaning of home, but also the Southern California lifestyle that currently has all eyes upon it.