You may think that you know Matt Moore’s work: the spectacular projects on his family’s farm, which used the scale of fields to explore the legacy of Land Art and the suburbanization. Then there is his Digital Farm Collective – a project supported by a Creative Capital grant and debuted at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival – which uses time-lapse photography to educate consumers about the produce they eat, its growing process and the time-based concepts integral to agriculture.
However, his exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum – And the Land Grew Quiet: New Work by Matthew Moore – is unlike anything you have seen before. The exhibition represents an innovative and new direction in Moore’s work, contrasting the cycles of development and speculation in our own time with those of the Great Depression by mixing technology and nature as well as fiction and history.  It is conceived as a single project that maps urban growth on the land and nature’s resistance to the man-made within the sublime context of the harsh but awe-inspiring landscape and climate of central Arizona.