Upon initial consideration, there may seem to be few occupations as wildly disparate as farming and art. But farmer/artist Matthew Moore of Waddell not only has dedicated his life to both, he has combined them.
At this moment, Moore’s acclaimed multimedia documentation of the Southwest’s fast-fading “Salad Bowl” era is one-fourth of a “Regarding the Rural” exhibition now on view in North Adams, Mass., at MASS MoCA, the country’s largest center for contemporary visual and performing arts.
Although the center of Moore’s showcases are his photographs, his virtual canvases are the fields of Sycamore Farms, which sit on a square mile of Waddell owned by his family since the early 1930s.
Last year, for example, Moore grew a 20-acre field of barley and over five months used a hoe to carve out the floor plan of a giant, three bedroom, two bath model home — and then took pictures of his work from the ground and an airplane.
“The interesting thing about Western agriculture is that our land is split up into little blocks of 20- and 40-acre pieces, one after the other,” Moore said. “By putting that floor plan there, and photographing it from above, it looked like each of those parcels was a lot in a housing development.”
Moore, 29, isn’t making any boldly negative, down-with-development statements with such creations. Yes, he’s a hard-working, fourth-generation, full-time farmer — but he views the changes in the West Valley’s agricultural landscape as inevitable.
“You can’t sit on your porch with a shotgun and be a crank about it,” Moore said with a laugh. “I think at some point you have to embrace it and grow with it, and hopefully it will change you for the better.”
In other words, it is not this farmer/artist’s creative mission to point out what’s wrong with the world.
“I think there’s enough of that to go around. I’m just trying to illuminate some of the changes,” he said. “Hopefully, my artwork will inspire people to ask their own questions, do their own research and come up with their own answers.”
Paving the way
The fields of Sycamore Farms originally were purchased by Moore’s cotton-farming grandfather, Robert Moore, who passed it on to his son, Michael — who turned the business into a carrot farm and is now in the process of handing it over to his farmer/artist son.
Matthew Moore has lived on this land near Olive Avenue and Cotton Lane since he was 6 months old, and for many years, it appeared as if his future were carved in stone.
“When I was growing up, my father used to say, ‘There’s nothing you can learn in school that you can’t learn on a farm,” he recalled.
Even so, Moore enrolled in California’s Santa Clara University, signed up for an art history class and “really started to enjoy it.” Later, at San Francisco State University, he earned his master’s degree in fine art.
“During that time, a lot of the development started happening around Waddell. They took down a bunch of citrus trees, about 300 acres of them that had been here for something like 70 years,” he said. “I really noticed that the landscape was changing rapidly, and that I would be interested in somehow archiving or preserving the history of the area for the people who would eventually come here.”
The further Moore pursued that goal, the more he came to find much in common between the eras of the West Valley agricultural boom and the West Valley development boom.
“The farmer’s quest for increasing yields and how much product he can get per acre is no different than someone else’s quest to build the most houses per acre,” Moore said.
“That’s why I really don’t feel angry about all the development. We provided that equation, that sensibility, in agriculture. We kind of paved the way for all the people who are now coming here to start their new lives — just like my family did back in the 1930s.”
An ‘all-inclusive experience’
Moore’s current art project is his most daunting yet. On a 20-acre field near Olive Avenue and Cotton Lane, he is hand-hoeing out an “exact-replica” of a 250-house development that’s slated for construction on the same parcel — land his family once farmed.
“I’m not saying that in the future I wouldn’t do something different as an artist. But this is a developing part of my career, and I’m having a great start,” Moore said. “Right now, what seems to be working fantastically is to be able to develop a whole language based on your daily life – and my daily life is farming.”
That language, translated into Moore’s art exhibitions, not only incorporates his photographs, but videos of him working Sycamore Farms, and — hanging from the ceiling — bundles of genuine, Arizona-grown wheat.
“I try to make it an all-inclusive experience, where all the senses are taken care of,” Moore said.
“What gives me the most pleasure is seeing people from all walks of life saying, ‘Wow! That’s wheat! I’ve never seen that or smelled that before!’ That’s what I enjoy: giving people the chance to see this important part of our history.”
To view samples of Matthew Moore’s art, visit his Web site at www.urbanplough.com.
Mike Burkett can be reached by e-mail
at mburkett@westvalleyview.com.
