NATURE CULT, SEEDED: Center for Maine Contemporary Art

Donald Moffett's solo exhibition NATURE CULT, SEEDED at Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland. 

The institution's press release follows:

NATURE CULT, SEEDED is the artist’s first exhibition in Maine, where he is a seasonal resident on North Haven. Moffett (b. 1955, San Antonio, TX) emerged as both an artist and activist in the late 1980s, participating in ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), as a founding member of the collective Gran Fury, and as a founding partner in BUREAU, a trans-disciplinary studio. Taking abstraction and the monochrome as evolving unfinished languages, Moffett challenges the traditional flat frame of painting through non-traditional techniques and employs new forms that serve as carriers of both personal and political meaning. Currently, Moffett is pursuing NATURE CULT, a deep study and expanding practice of how art and the environmental crisis might collide. “The intensity of a cult is called for as we turn our attention to nature and its preservation,” says the artist.

NATURE CULT, SEEDED is the latest iteration in an ongoing series. The exhibition is centered on the large-scale sculptural installation, Lot 030323/24 (the golden bough), an assemblage of dead tree limbs painted gold and bolted together to form an undead yet ethereal totem to life. In a recent interview with fellow North Haven resident architect Toshiko Mori in Domus magazine, Moffett speaks of his interest in “the tree, the fundamental unit of a forest and the web of ecology that builds out from the tree. When you mess with the tree, a system can fall apart.” Other works in the exhibition are new wall-mounted and freestanding sculptures incorporating the form of weathered birdhouses punctured and perforated and painted in intense hues. Also included is a selection of the artist’s emblematic shaped and carved panel paintings finished in luminous epoxy resin or given a lush pelt of extruded paint, referencing various organic and bodily forms. Throughout the exhibition, the haunting sound of the now-extinct male Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō bird can be heard calling for a mate that will never come. At once ominous and seductive, DONALD MOFFETT | NATURE CULT, SEEDED is a clarion call to the precariousness of our planet under stress. “I don’t think there are issues more important than nature and its health,” says the artist.