Matthew Moore | Portfolio Categories Public Art

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May 13, 2015 In

Lifecycles: Nuit Blanche

The Lifecycles installation at Nuit Blanche used a six-screen 32-foot circular video installation to transformed Pecaut Square for one night with imagery of vibrant growth cycles in the heart of an urban setting. The installation combined brilliant visual imagery with original musical arrangements to highlight the intimate time-based processes integral to agriculture. Bridging nature and culture, it created a space for natural cycles at the heart of an urban setting that often overrides such rhythms. The all-night festival included more than 150 projects, from small to large scale, throughout the city and was attended by thousands of visitors from around the world. Crowds of people stopped to watch lettuce, radish, squash, and other vegetables grow before their eyes. Some stayed for hours. Using the wonderment and simplicity of growth cycles to captures people’s attention, the entire 26-minute film cycle was seen by thousands of people over the course of the night.

May 13, 2015 In

Rotations: Moore Estates

In 2004, my grandfather sold the first portion of our family’s land to a developer for a 253 home suburban community. The design is a scaled replica of the planned lot map that was submitted by the developers to the city of Surprise, AZ. The site for the earthwork was chosen in its relation to the actual building area of the development. I mapped it out at a third scale using a CAD program and a GPS surveying crew. The 253 homes were planted in Sorghum, and the roads are seeded wheat.

May 13, 2015 In

Rotations: Single Family Residence

This is the first of a series of large-scale earthworks. I 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. I created the entire image of Single Family Residence using a hoe, following strings staked out 400 feet at a time. I documented myself 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.

May 13, 2015 In

Rotations: The Craftsman Bungalow

This installation was created for the Armory Center for the Arts in conjunction with the Tender Land Festival in Pasadena. I planted seventy citrus trees in the model of the first Craftsman bungalow floorplan in Pasadena, the “tract” home of its time. The site was on Sierra Madre Boulevard where there was once a large number of citrus groves before the real estate boom in the early 1920s in that area. Included on the site was a faux historical landmark plaque describing the project.

May 12, 2015 In

Feast on the Street

Feast on the Street brought the community together for a free public event around a half-mile long dining table in downtown Phoenix, transforming the street into a pedestrian promenade in celebration of food and art in the desert. The event was a collaboration with British artist Clare Patey, the ASU Art Museum and Roosevelt Row CDC. The event is based on London’s Feast on the Bridge, which was founded by Patey and has taken place for over five years during the annual Thames Festival. The event, in the tradition of community harvest festivals, celebrates our connection to locally grown, locally sourced and locally prepared foods in the heart of downtown Phoenix and the Arts District.

April 30, 2015 In

Passage

Passage is a large, sculptural shade structure designed for the Mariposa Land Port of Entry in Nogales, on the border of Arizona and Mexico. It depicts the abstracted topography of an inverted mountain range, its craggy peaks pointing down. The piece was inspired by my deep connection to the Arizona landscape, as well as the dramatic mountain passages that frame the otherwise flat terrain of the Southwest. Passage takes its shape from the nearby Baboquivari Mountains, which run north-south across the border. For millennia, mountain ranges have served as important navigational landmarks for both people and animals. They surround and direct the flow of human population throughout this seemingly perilous environment. To evoke this sense of migration, I affixed a pathway of colored acrylic markers across the artwork’s metallic landscape. These markers also reference the daily passage of travelers through the port facility. The dynamic play of shadows cast by the artwork and the light filtering through and bouncing off its aluminum surfaces create ever-changing experiences for those walking beneath the sculpture.

April 30, 2015 In

Digital Farm Collective

As a fourth generation farmer whose land and life are quickly being overcome by suburbia, I was inspired to create the Digital Farm Collective to collect and share the images of the most important daily process of agriculture, the growth of our produce. Using time-lapse photography, I began the process of filming everything I grew and inviting other farmers from around the world to do the same. Solar powered camera units, each equipped with a weather station to monitor the environmental growing conditions of the plant, took a photo and a reading every 15 minutes from the time a seed was planted to the time the plant was harvested. Each full growing cycle was compiled into a time-lapse film showing a single production cycle of each plant or tree. These films, along with scientific agricultural data and interviews with farmers were compiled to create an international database. The Digital Farm Collective strived to bridge the knowledge gap between farmer and consumer, improve future growing practices, and to reconnect people with the food that they eat. The time-lapse films combined the magic of watching food grow and the knowledge of the time it takes for a plant to mature to help shift the way people relate to their food. The films are used for educational curriculum, installations in supermarkets and public spaces, and as a resource for future growers.

April 30, 2015 In

Avenida Rio Salado

Architect Mark Ryan and I are working with City of Phoenix departments and the community to design streetscape enhancements along a segment of Avenida Rio Salado/Broadway Road from 7th Street to 51st Avenue in Southern Phoenix. The project improves park frontage and incorporates 25 bus stops into the overall landscape design, creating empathetic moments along an industrial path.