Rockland, Maine
Center for Maine Contemporary Art
Viewers enter Donald Moffett’s single-room exhibition “Nature Cult, Seeded” (on view through September 8, 2024) to the sounds of birdsong. Wall text identifies the song, recorded in 1976, as that of the only living survivor of a vanished species—a male Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō bird seeking his extinct mate. It is one of the many achievements of Moffett’s show that this type of natural history museum effect comes across as neither cheesy nor sentimental; instead, it establishes a contemplative yet somewhat ominous mood, setting the stage for and uniting a variety of disparate objects. The exhibition title, “Nature Cult,” lays out the immense challenge that Moffett has set himself—the development of a new kind of visual language to deal specifically with the issue of climate catastrophe. He feels that “the intensity of a cult is called for as we turn our attention to nature and its preservation.” He deliberately chose the word “cult” to be shocking and provocative, to stress urgency and community. His playbook of imagery and language results in a penetrating look at how the collaborative forces of art and science can intersect with the crisis.
In a 2023 Domus interview, Moffett referred to the tree as the “fundamental unit of a forest,” saying, “When you mess with a tree, a system can fall apart.” A composite sculpture, Lot 030323 (the golden bough) (2023), lies at the heart of “Nature Cult.” This tree-like structure consists of gold-painted, bolted-together sections of trunk, branches, and a hollowed-out log. Two small, blood-red rectangular plates are mounted on opposite sides of the “trunk,” creating the appearance of a grotesquely gaudy shrine to the threatened forest. Weathered birdhouses radiate around this central object—some balanced on spindly tree-like columns, one a cobalt blue-painted complex of several birdhouses mounted on a wall. While other works in the exhibition refer to the body or other organic forms, everything that Moffett has fabricated is evocative of a range of natural imagery while remaining extraordinarily, pointedly, artificial.
The show is given another layer of meaning through the presence of a poem nailed to the wall in a corner of the room. Moffett copied out the text in longhand on the back of an envelope from the Union of Concerned Scientists. The poem, “All Bread,” by Margaret Atwood, ends with these words: “Together we eat this earth.”
Amitav Ghosh, in his book The Great Derangement, makes the point that the climate crisis “is a crisis of culture and the imagination.” Viewing the tardy and insufficient reaction to global warming as an immense imaginative failure, he sees politicians as too compromised to mount an adequate response to the emergency, too incapable of creative solutions. For Ghosh, a new language of solutions to tackle the “derangement” of climate change is most likely to arise from the conjoined community of artists and scientists. Moffett, in response to Ghosh’s call for new language, puts the metaphorical to work in tandem with scientific evidence. By never resorting to the merely literal, by using inference and the poetic sublime, Moffett’s work enacts a crucial conversation between the ideal of nature and its threatened reality.
