Final Weekend Upcoming For Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition On North Fork Of Long Island

This weekend will mark the closing of the annual outdoor exhibition at Landcraft Gardens on Long Island, this year featuring sculpture by artists Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez.

The gardens are located in Mattituck, N.Y., on the North Fork of Long Island.

“The dual exhibition of Sam Moyer and Eddie Martinez is a thought-provoking playbook on contemporary sculpture,” said artist Ugo Rondinone, who curated the exhibition. “Charged with a humanity, and sense of touch, the sculptures are probing further than ever into the core of what makes sculptures exert their powerful effects on individual people. The sculptures focus on interactions between the animate and the inanimate, between the marriage of sculpture and soil, and the ephemeral quality of the light that lets us see things. The exhibition aims to peer beneath the constructions of culture and reason that burden us with an alienated consciousness to celebrate the primitive and mystical vision of art and nature.”

The exhibition features 14 sculptures by the artists, who are married to each other, with 11 by Martinez and three by Moyer, dating from 2016 to 2022. Moyer’s work is installed at the center of round arbors or “rondels” made from locust wood harvested from the property, while Martinez’s work is installed throughout the gardens’ grounds.

Martinez, an abstract painter, began creating sculpture in 2013, using objects found on North Fork beaches and on the streets near his Brooklyn studio. He arranged these objects into improvised configurations and cast them in bronze. Although they are nonrepresentational, they suggest animal and human forms.

Moyer’s Dependents series, Landcraft Gardens said, “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.”

Landcraft Gardens are a “living laboratory” that displays plant collections, celebrates the diversity of design and horticulture, and, they say, provides a” place to explore human connection with the natural world.”

The gardens were established in 1992 by Dennis Schrader and Bill Smith when they bought 17 acres of land that surrounded an 1840’s-era farmhouse. Landcraft Environments, Ltd, a for-profit horticulture wholesaler, supplies plants to botanical gardens, public parks, garden centers and landscape designers throughout the Northeast and mid-Atlantic.

Landcraft Gardens are located on a narrow spit of land between the Long Island Sound, Mattituck Creek and Peconic Bay, which the gardens say “provides an unusually long, moderate growing season, perfectly suited” for their development.

The mission of the Landcraft Garden Foundation is to inpire, educate and promote “gardening, horticulture, and the preservation of our natural environment” and to “provide a horticulturally diverse garden that offers knowledge of the plant world and acts as a laboratory for experimenting with horticultural techniques, plant diversity, breeding, and design. Ultimately the Foundation’s intention is to provide the experience of peace and stability that gardens bring to people throughout the world.”