Lifecycles

Write up in Phoenix New Times

Here is a link to an article by Kathleen Vanesian in the Phoenix New Times, a local newspaper out in my diggs in Arizona.

http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/uponsun/2010/01/food_for_thought_artist_matthe.php

A little blurb:

Food for Thought: Artist Matthew Moore to Show Work at 2010 Sundance Film Festival

Phoenix artist Matthew Moore, who’s also a fourth-generation Arizona farmer, has just combined my two all-time favorite activities: food shopping and art viewing. His latest video installation, “Lifecycles,” which magically melds the two, is premiering at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier exhibition. The event, curated by film festival senior programmer Shari Frilot, has, for several years, run concurrently with the star-studded, Robert Redford-originated film festival in Park City, Utah……

Rendering of lifecycles in local store.

Radish harvested

Well, today my dad and I harvested the radishes for one of the videos.  The weather has been perfect, and it shows in the short season with these plants.  Normally during this time of year, with our short winter days, it may take anywhere from 50-70 days to have a proper size radish for market, but these suckers made it  in under 45 days.  While a week may not seem like that big of a difference to those of you reading this post, it is colossal.  The reason being that when you grow on a large scale like the company which leases ground to grow these radishes from our family (Miedema Produce), your harvest is planned to sustain a certain level of product for up to 6 months.  For example, say you plant 1000 acres of radishes a year, you cannot plant that all at once.  You have to stretch it out over the course of the year while planning for supply and demand considerations based on your past years’ experience.  So the big season for radishes is during the Super Bowl – party veggie packs with ranch…come on, you know what I talking about.  It is basically a large tray of veggies which are vehicles for Ranch dressing, but I digress.  To plan for this rise of demand in the middle of the season you have to increase your acreage to have ample amounts of produce ready to harvest the week before the big game.  So you plan as much as 6 months in advance.  If you lay it out on a graph the acreage will look like a bell curve, the week before the Super Bowl being the peak of that diagram.

Here is the kicker, you planted radishes for that delivery date based on a days to harvest average of 60 days and you show up 2 weeks early.  It is a ripple effect, your planted acreage reduces after Super Bowl weekend so you have planted less acreage in advance.  You end up at the party with a radish shortage, and then Florida farmers get snowed on….no more radishes around, so you become enticed by harvesting sooner to keep up with the demand and corresponding rise in price…so on so forth,  Eventually you have to stop to catch up, you get the idea.

The end of the story is farming is a constantly changing landscape, if it’s not the weather, it’s the market, and if is not the market, it is encroachment, drought, seed shortage, back aches, foot pain, and broken tractors….I better stop.  What a dream crusher I am.  But the rewards are truly infinite.  It is a unique life to work with something that you are bringing to life to sustain other people’s lives

radish harvest

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Farm History

My family has been farming the same land 35 miles west of Phoenix, Arizona since the 1920’s.   My grandfather’s uncle Jim purchased the first small portion of the ground back then, and soon after my grandfather moved from Richmond, California to be raised by his Uncle Jim and Aunt Lola.  Waddell, Arizona did not have much to offer back then from a farming point of view, but with the newly constructed Waddell Dam in the early ’20s the desert landscape was quickly being plowed under to grow citrus, grapes, and eventually a crop that Arizona became well known for, cotton.  My grandfather met my grandmother in Phoenix and they were married as they finished up their time in the military. They used their GI bills to purchase the first major piece of ground since the original family purchase.  Mickey and Bob farmed alfalfa in the begining years, but expanded to cotton as market prices rose for the commodity in the post war economy.  My grandparents raised three children, in Waddell.   Michael, the oldest, is my Father, and he ended up returning to the farm after a stint in the Navy and a quick job search in aerospace engineering, both of which had career paths that dimmed in comparison to return to the farm.  My father returned to the farm just before I was born and steered the business though some tough times during the ’90s when the cotton market was bottoming out….they do not call cotton poverty weed for no reason.  In the ’90s my father grew organic green and brown cotton, watermelons, onions, and many other vegetables until settling on carrots, which we still grow today.  I returned from undergraduate school and worked for a few years on the farm before returning to school to get a graduate degree in sculpture in San Francisco.  It was during that time the development began to ramp up in the Phoenix area.  By the time I returned from San Francisco in 2003 to the farm, suburbia was less than 3 miles from my childhood home.  I have been running the family business ever since my return.  We still grow carrots, and now parsnips.  We also have two small organic farms, one a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), the other a direct market farm for restaurants and markets.  It is on these farms that the time lapse units reside.

Nearby Development 2003

Time Lapse Units

Each of the time lapse units is constructed with a weatherproof box which holds a camera, and a timing mechanism which is programmed to take a photograph every 15 min to an hour depending on the selected subject.  On top of each unit is a solar panel which ensures any camera can remain on its subject for months to years.  The cameras shoot day and night and are programed to capture 6MP photographs.  While this is well beyond the needs of any high definition film making today, the images are meant to stand the advances in technology so they may be used  in future.

Time Lapse Unit at Work

Editing the Footage

At this point, I have footage from about a dozen different plants.  Each has about 10,000 images. The cameras are programmed to take a picture every 15 minutes for plants and once every hour for trees (i.e. grapefruit).  All of the footage is downloaded and copied to 3 separate hard drives for what they call in the engineering world, “redundancy“.  After going through all the footage and removing the photos taken during the night, I upload them into Final Cut Pro, a video editing program.  That is when the fun begins, if you like tedious, slow tasks that someone professional could do in a 1/10 of the time.  Nonetheless, I go through all of the footage and adjust for any camera movement that happened during the 4-7 months of each plants life.  It is actually quite gratifying, it is like a secret world has been revealed of these vegetables lives and you discover all the small details that go unnoticed even from a farmer that has been growing each of the plants for years.

squash ground view

working on Sundance

4 units documenting Kale, Swiss Chard, Red Cabbage and Cauliflower

Well, the mad rush to get everything ready for Sundance is well underway.  I have two environments to install in, one is at the Fresh Market store in Park City (formerly Albertson’s) and another in an indoor mall in downtown Park City .  They are going to be two seperate installations giving people something different to look at in each site, so I don’t bore them to tears…hopefully.  Both of the installations are part of the New Frontier program which highlights artists, filmakers, scientists, and now farmers who are using the moving image in a non-narrative manner.

Needless to say, I am so excited to be included in this years festival!! Woo-hoo!  I also will effectively have the longest screenings of everyone as my work will be playing constantly at the grocery store, which is awesome.

Here is a link to the New Frontier programming this year.  there is a lot of amazing work that will be there so come on down if you are in the area to 333 Main street:

http://festival.sundance.org/2010/film_events/new_frontier/

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