Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Coughing in the pipes, an exhibition of new paintings by Luke Rogers. This presentation marks the artist’s first with the gallery, and will be on view September 13 - October 25, 2025. “Water is important to people who do not have it,” Joan Didion wrote, “and the same is true of control.” She was talking about California, and the impressive machinery–“the aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains”–that has, since the early 20th Century, made American life as we know it to be plausible in the West. Those means of control are the subjects of Luke Rogers’ new paintings, a body of work that traverses the distance between dams in Oroville and Antelope Valley, the Jawbone siphon in the Sierras, the Los Angeles aqueduct, and the sink in his studio. Both plumbing and what Didion calls “plumbing on a grand scale”: the system of pipes, big and small, that deliver drinking water to his glass. Excerpt of exhibition text by Henry Chapman