Donald Moffett was raised in San Antonio, Texas. He studied both biology and art at Trinity University, a small—by Texas standards—bespoke liberal arts school. His formative youth was bookended by the turbulent, roiling sixties of his childhood and early adolescence—the Vietnam War, political assassinations, the civil rights movement, the rise of second wave feminism—and the 1980s, which foregrounded the AIDS epidemic and gay rights, just as he came of age as an important artist of conscience and someone to watch closely.
His recent exhibition, Nature Cult, Seeded, at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) was organized by former CMCA director and independent curator, Suzette McAvoy. McAvoy notes:
Art and nature have long been intertwined in Maine … generations of artists have been drawn to the state by its natural beauty, its rugged coastline and wooded interiors. Moffett’s installation extends this continuum to the present day. With the knowledge that the water temperature in the Gulf of Maine is rising three times faster than the global average, and the recent catastrophic flooding across the state, Moffett’s artistic response to environmental concerns is both timely and consequential.
The casual visitor looking to escape urban heat for sea breezes and shade trees in Maine will not likely find respite in this unruly show. Its eclectic waywardness includes paintings that are sculptures, or the reverse—works hovering seductively beyond easy definition. Hard, polished, high-gloss surfaces are punctured with perfectly rounded or elliptical perforations that occasionally seem to look back at the viewer like multi-eyed creatures of video games or mediated memes. To my mind, their curving, sleek, asymmetrical low-relief surfaces reference oceanic oil spills, foliage, dancing Disney flames, crime scene blood droplets, Hokusai wave spindrift, and 3D Road Runner cartoon splats. A wall-mounted triplex of birdhouses, Lot 110123 (nature cult, houses) (2023), is awash with a vibrant ultramarine blue that natural light in the Toshiko Mori-designed main gallery transforms into infinite gradients of a deep, purple-violet mist. Other free-standing birdhouses are literally held aloft on spindly wood poles, stripped naked and seeded at their bases by loose piles of sunflower seeds, corn kernels, and pecans.
These “life-size” (for birds) sculptures are juxtaposed with seemingly unrelated, free-floating, conceptual objects: a digital print of a brutalist style Bates Motel-like concrete picnic table, photographed by Moffett at night; a handwritten envelope inscribed with a poem by Margaret Atwood ending with the words, “together / we eat this earth.”
We are greeted at the exhibition entrance with a hand-made wooden sign announcing, “Vacancy,” with letters made of twigs, rebar, and bent spikes—leftover fragments from some apocalyptic collapse or, more probably, bits of junkyard detritus swept into a demolition site waste bin. The sign is mounted within a galvanized metal watering can next to a chartreuse birdhouse, itself placed on a rubber car tire filled with pecans. Tilting and wobbly, the sign and birdhouse question stability in a world increasingly anchored only by our certainty of uncertainty. The vacancy sign—made of pointy objects—suddenly becomes the whole point: an open-ended non sequitur announcing a last refuge for human kind in empty birdhouses—and art.
