Matthew Moore

American, b. 1976, San Jose, California; lives and works in Goodyear, Arizona

Matthew Moore has reinvented the legacy of earthworks to comment on the loss of farmland to urban growth since earning his MFA in sculpture from San Francisco State University in 2003. The artist’s belief that today “the urban and rural do not meet; they collide” comes from personal experience. His family has farmed the same land outside of Phoenix, Arizona, for four generations, and they have gradually sold acres of their land over the past several years as development has moved closer to their home. The artist’s first response was Moore Rotations: Single Family Residence (2003–2004), a twenty-acre field of barley next to newly built suburban homes on which Moore carved out an enlarged plan of a typical single-family tract home. The lines on the floor plan were actually six-foot-wide rows of overturned earth that the artist hoed by hand, laboriously marking the banal patterns of homes that would soon overtake the field. In 2005, Moore began the next work in his Rotations series, Moore Estates. He attained the blueprints for a developer’s planned community on land purchased from the artist’s family, and re-created it at one third scale in sorghum and wheat on 35 adjacent acres. The artist used a computer-aided-design program and a global-positioning satellite system to plot the roads and rows of homes on the field, and this first step allowed him to visualize how suburbanization would change his land. However, over the next two years, as the sorghum “houses” grew thick and strong and the black-beard wheat “roads” were allowed to run their full cycle and turn brown for harvest, their organic growth stood in marked contrast to the rapid, unsustainable suburban growth happening next to it. Moore’s work has been exhibited at the Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe; Sonoma County Museum, Santa Rosa, California; the University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg; and MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts.