Matthew Moore: Fieldwork

Fieldwork features the work of Arizona-based artist, farmer, and food activist Matthew Moore. Situated at the intersection of art and agriculture, Moore’s social practice engages issues related to land, food, and sustainability as means to deepen environmental knowledge while increasing consciousness of our relationship to the land and food production. Offering a poignant lens on the loss of farmland to urban growth, Moore has explained, “As a farmer and an artist, I display the realities of this transition in order to rationalize and document my displacement from the land on which I was raised. The trials and tribulations of American agriculture, its roles in contemporary globalization, and its continually debated ecological practices create a foundation for my explorations.”

Inserting the land back into public consciousness to recentre conversations about sustainable practices, his work blends documentary tactics, land-based installation, and community engagement, evoking the legacy of environmental practices and land art such as the work of Robert Smithson and Agnes Denes, as well as the lineage of interdisciplinary and participatory practices including Black Mountain College and the social sculpture of Joseph Beuys. Deftly maneuvering within these art histories, Moore’s work reimagines commitment to place in a global context, instilling the local with universal scope.

Currently participating in the LAND Studio program facilitated by the Art Gallery of Guelph and Musagetes, Moore has extended his work focused on the American southwest to explore urban growth and landscape transformation in this region, working with historical collections of maps and aerial survey photographs housed by the University of Guelph Library to mine rich archives of geographical and visual data amassed over decades of field research that underpinned 20th century land use decisions. Capturing the ongoing transposition of organic patterns and natural topographies to grids of surveyed parcels of land, and plans filled with concentric streets and culs-de-sac, Moore’s work offers a viscerally affecting visual materialization of the transformation of space.

Image detail: Matthew Moore, Rotations: Moore Estates #5, 2006, 35 acre project, sorghum, wheat, C-print, 61 × 76.2 cm