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Matthew Moore Urban Plough
Background • Matthew Moore is a fourth generation farmer whose land and life is quickly being overcome by suburban sprawl. He creates large site-specific earthworks on and around his family’s land, which highlight the grounds on which the urban and rural collide and compete. Moore also works with video and installation art, addressing issues of ecological, cultural, and economical sustainability revealed through his artistic narrative regarding the potential loss of the romanticized American farm.
Artist Statement • “The trials and tribulations of American agriculture, its roles in contemporary globalization, and its questionable ecological practices create a foundation for my explorations. By displaying the past and future of the farm, I have used our land to explore similarities between commercial agriculture and suburbia, which reveal their social, cultural and economic impacts locally, nationally and internationally. Documenting the reality of land and appetite from agriculture to suburbia, the decisions of our society reveal consumer models that make us disobedient to our relationship with land and time. By exhibiting this theater of evolution and loss, I have entered a historical dialogue of displacement that reveals my part (in agriculture) in the transformation of my family’s land and identity. Through my artwork, I look at these dilemmas which reveal the impact of the American dream on our society and the land as we transition towards a post agrarian nation.”
Digital Farm Collective Digital Farm Collective collects and shares images of the most important daily process of agriculture, the growth of our produce. Using time-lapse photography, he has begun the process of filming everything he grows and inviting other farmers to do the same. The arranged short films show a single production cycle of each plant or tree. Footage and interviews of farmers all over the world will be compiled to create an international database, or living library that shares the footage, philosophies, and agricultural data on the growth of our produce to reconnect us with our food and share the stories of the plants and the farmers and families that grow them.
And the Land Grew Quiet • And the Land Grew Quiet, contrasts the cycles of development and speculation in our own time with those of the Great Depression by mixing technology and nature as well as fiction and history. It is conceived as a single project that maps urban growth on the land and nature's resistance to the man-made within the sublime context of the harsh but awe-inspiring landscape and climate of central Arizona. This work reflects on the rapidly changing landscape of the American Southwest and questions how land is commodified, i.e. aided either by historic mythology or through the land's literal production.
Rotations: Single Family Residence • He used a twenty-acre field of barley as a canvas through which an enlarged floorplan of a common single-family residence home was eliminated by hand. The lines of the floorplan were eight feet wide. Over 5,500 lateral feet were carved from the field. It was necessary for him to rent the site two miles south of my family’s land out of consideration for my Grandfather and his efforts in negotiating the zoning of our land with the city of Surprise. The entire image took four months to create. He documented himself in this video (45 minutes long, comprised of a single shot) to examine the futile role of a farmer performing the act of clearing the land for future development. He wanted to capture an earnest glimpse of the life of a toiler and honor the monotony of the labor.
Rotations: Moore Estates • “In October of 2004, my grandfather sold the first portion of our family's land for a 253 home suburban community. The cultivated field is the planned lot map that was submitted to the city of Surprise. I acquired this map from the city and used as the template for the design of the land artwork, Rotations: Moore Estates.” • “The site for the earthwork was chosen in its relation to the actual building area of the development. I mapped out Moore Estates at a third scale using a CAD program and a GPS surveying crew. The 253 homes were planted in Sorghum, and the roads were seeded wheat.”
Floorplan This was a temporal installation based on lines of floorplans and my first exploration dealing with the commodification of the land outside the boundaries of agriculture. To address transformation of space, cotton bolls were installed green and over the course of the exhibition all bloomed.
Mariposa Land Port of Entry This monumental sculpture is designed for the Mariposa Land Port of Entry in Nogales, on the border of Arizona and Mexico. Commissioned by the General Services Administration's (GSA) public art program, it depicts the abstracted topography of an inverted mountain range. The artwork takes into consideration the geography of Nogales as well as its historical and functional use as a passage between two places.
Urban Transplanter • The urban transplanter is a mechanized interactive sculpture that germinates and distributes seedlings to the community. Installed at the Armory Center for the Arts, this project is a prototype for a modular system that can be incorporated into any vacant lot. The system runs on solar power and is designed to be entirely sustainable. The small loading conveyor at the rear of the lot is supplied with seedling transplants. Three times a day, a new section of transplant pods is discharged onto the 75-foot long conveyor belt and over the course of two weeks travels the distance to the city sidewalk. During this journey, the seedling will germinate and sprout its first leaves. It is then delivered through the cyclone fence to be picked up by passersby. The success of the system is contingent on people planting and growing the newly germinated seedlings.
Lifecycles • http://www.urbanplough.com/work/ “How long does it take to grow a carrot?” Documents, literally the life cycle of hundreds of species of cultivated plants using time lapse photography compiled into video, in an attempt to change the relationship that consumers have to the foods that they eat that local farmers have worked so hard to raise
