Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez
Sculpture in the Garden
Landcraft Garden Foundation, Mattituck, NY
Curated by Ugo Rondinone
The Landcraft Garden Foundation announces that the 2022 season of its annual outdoor exhibition, Sculpture in the Garden, will present the work of artists Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez. The exhibition is curated by the internationally celebrated artist Ugo Rondinone, a member of the Landcraft Garden Foundation Art Advisory Board, and will be on view at Landcraft Garden from June 4 through October 29, 2022.
A hidden gem on the North Fork of Long Island, Landcraft Garden offers four acres of botanical gardens surrounded by nearly ten acres of meadows, which are open to the public on Fridays and Saturdays. The Foundation seeks to activate the artistic community of the North Fork with annual exhibitions that provide opportunities to view sculpture in dialogue with natural flora. The inaugural Sculpture in the Garden series launched in summer 2021 with the work of artist Ned Smyth, also curated by Rondinone.
“Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez’s sculptures focus on interactions between the animate and inanimate, between the marriage of sculpture and soil and the ephemeral quality of light, that let us see things,” says Rondinone.
The 2022 edition of Sculpture in the Garden will showcase 20 sculptures by the married couple, with 17 by Martinez and three by Moyer. The works date from 2016–2022, and several are monumental in size. Moyer’s work will be installed at the center of round arbors or “rondels” crafted from locust wood harvested from the property. Martinez’s Half Stepping Hot Stepper will be installed at the center of a large flowering bed, near a Linden allée. A second large untitled sculpture by Martinez will be installed in a garden room hedged by Hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) at the end of a long view. Smaller works by Martinez will be installed near the subterranean grotto, a slightly below-ground gathering place on the south side of the garden.
Martinez, an influential abstract painter, began creating sculpture in 2013, collecting found objects on the beaches of the North Fork of Long Island and on the streets around his Brooklyn studio, including cardboard, wood, plastic, rubber, bottle caps, and metal grills, along with such marine detritus as old buoys and lobster traps. The raw materials were arranged into improvised configurations and then cast in bronze, transforming their presence while preserving their forms. The sculptures are finished with oil, enamel, and spray paint. While nonrepresentational, they suggest human and animal forms that parallel those found in his paintings.
Ranging from four to six feet in height, Moyer’s Dependents series references codependency, and while it is understood as emotionally exploitative in human relationships, it is an essential condition of sculpture and architecture, which require systems of support such as joints, hinges, and counterweights in order to function. Moyer’s Dependentssculptures from 2021 comprise two separate entities: one made from aggregate concrete, the other a piece of Belgian Bluestone. Married by a rough hand-drawn joint, inspired by Japanese joinery, one cannot stand without the other.
Sam Moyer (b. 1983, Chicago, IL) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington D.C. in 2005 and her Master of Fine Arts from Yale University, New Haven, CT in 2007. In Moyer’s practice, issues of scale and space are critical, and Moyer is particularly interested in the way architecture functions in tandem with her objects to create dynamic visual experiences. Uniting found textures and objects in innovative ways, Moyer manipulates them into beautifully abstract formal works that provoke a new, expanded artistic vocabulary. Moyer’s first solo public art installation, Doors for Doris, commissioned by Public Art Fund, was on view at the entrance to Central Park on Doris C. Freedman Plaza last year. Her works are featured in prominent public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, France. Moyer has exhibited her work at The Drawing Center, New York, NY; The Bass Museum, Miami, FL; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO; LAND, Los Angeles, CA; and Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden. Moyer has participated in important group exhibitions, including Inherent Structure, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2018); and Greater New York Between Spaces at MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2010). She lives and works in Brooklyn and Orient, NY.
Working in between the lines of representation and abstraction, Eddie Martinez (b. 1977, Groton Naval Base, CT) paints in oil, enamel, and spray paint while often incorporating found objects picked up from his studio floor, in a fast-paced practice that could be compared to automatism. Noted for his deft draftsmanship, Martinez creates large-scale works that maintain the feeling of drawings. His most apparent visual references are the CoBrA group and abstract expressionism. In addition to his paintings, Martinez creates found-object sculptures and works on paper. Museum exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI (2019); Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2019); Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY (2018); Drawing Center, New York, NY (2017); and the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA (2017). He lives and works in Brooklyn and Orient, NY.
During the run of Sculpture in the Garden, an exhibition of work by Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez will open at the South Etna Montauk Foundation, Adam Lindemann and Amalia Dayan’s art foundation in Montauk, NY. Comprising new and recent work, this exhibition will open during the first week of July 2022.