Local artist Matthew Moore premiered his new video project Lifecycles last month at Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier exhibition in Park City, Utah. Moore is the fourth, and most likely last, generation of farmers to till the soil on his family farm outside of Goodyear, Arizona. In a season when ecological concerns are for the moment fashionable, Moore brings a decade of land art practice to the table. As both a working artist and farmer, his contribution is more than a garnish.
New Frontiers on Main is the media and microcinema section of Sundance Film Festival. The range of artists at New Frontiers is global as is the rest of Sundance; this year’s exhibition showcased a dozen including performance artist Nao Bustamante and Swiss multimedia artist Pipilotti Rist. Moore’s Lifecycles chronicles the growth cycles of crops grown on his family farm using video cameras to capture the months’ long process in time-lapse photography. Four videos of radishes, lettuce, broccoli and squash growing from first buds breaking the soil to leaves furling in larger and larger mass were placed above the rows of vegetal bins in the produce isle at Fresh Market, a Park City grocery store, and again at the festival’s Main Street location in an installation that mimicked the store’s setup, but with accompanying vegetables available as free samples.
The work is as fresh his farm produce. As the artist explained, “We harvested the broccoli the day I drove to Salt Lake City.” Moore remarked that the reception to the piece as shown alongside other art installations on Main Street was engaged, but that while some shoppers at the grocery store were startled by the time-lapse displays on the screens, others seemed to take it all in as some sort of marketing ploy. If so, that may not have detracted from the work’s effectiveness. Message based work is not uncommon in museum and galleries, and predominates the offerings of some institutions such as Arizona State University Art Museum, which has exhibited Moore in the past. The institutional context for social and ecological concerned art delivers marketing text and other information explaining the works in the galleries, which is helpful, but also tends to reinforce assumptions that exacerbate green fatigue—the cloying feeling that one is being preached to.
Moore’s grocery store installation, on the contrary, is in the fine tradition of guerilla art. It doesn’t give the viewer warning signals in advance to let her name, categorize and prejudge the work.
Lifecycles is part of a larger project supported by a grant from the non-profit foundation Creative Capital, which focuses on funding experimental art. Video recorders, along with instruments to record temperature and precipitation, will be sent to farmers around the globe. One documentation unit is already installed in Italy at Lungarotti, a 200-year-old winery. Moore explains, “We’re making a living library. I will send units to farmers to document their crops and place the results into a data-base.”
Moore’s work differentiates itself from the general discussion on sustainability by presenting material facts rather than jumping to remedies. Details flow after the initial visual impact, but are as flat as the daily farm reports recited on the airways. As a farm manager as well as an artist, Moore seems convinced of the impact of data, asking, “If it takes 160 days to grow a carrot, how does knowing that change your relationship to what you see in the supermarket?”
Matthew Moore, Lifecycles
2010 Sundance Film Festival
New Frontiers on Main and
Park City Fresh Market grocery store
1760 Park Ave., Park City, Utah
January 21 – 30, 2010
Web: festival.sundance.org/2010/
Artist web: urbanplough.com
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