At the entrance to Donald Moffett’s newest sculptural installation, NATURE CULT, SEEDED, is a signpost in playground chartreuse, stood up in a weathered watering can, with the notice “Vacancy” spelled out in twigs painted so heavily they’re more plastic than wood. Just behind is a birdhouse—the first of many—this one planted in a rubber tire bed filled with whole pecans. What is this enigmatic, irresistible place of so many elegantly positioned birdhouses, perches, nests, and bird snacks? What is that achingly beautiful birdsong? Everywhere in the air of NATURE CULT, SEEDED is the sound of a male Kaua’i ’ō’ō, its call so distinct that the bird was named by Indigenous Hawaiians for it—’ō’ō being an onomatopoeic descriptor. The Kaua’i ’ō’ō has been extinct for more than 30 years. The very present, alive-seeming birdsong that fills the gallery is a mating call that will never be answered. Moffett, born 1955 in San Antonio, Texas, has degrees in art and biology, and he rose to prominence in the late 1980s for his art and activism in response to the AIDs epidemic. More recently, he has found personal and political resonance in the environmental crisis and, especially with NATURE CULT, an interest in “reconnecting languages of science and art, which have become estranged in recent years.”

Moffett’s reverence for Toshiko Mori’s two-story skylit gallery at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA)—a “rational, perfect space”—is apparent. NATURE CULT, SEEDED inhabits the space in harmony with the room’s inside/outside enormity. Golden Bough, the installation’s golden tree-form centerpiece, has been exhibited only once before, without the breathing room the work has here. This is a tree that holds things, a tree that someone or many people have taken care to enshrine in weather-resistant paint, and have literally fortified and preserved with prominent hardware that juts out like bird perches. There’s a mysterious ageless quality to Golden Bough; while most of the hardware feels new, one of its outcroppings has a rusted screw.

The CMCA installation is the eighth iteration of Moffett’s NATURE CULT, which the artist defined in a 2022 interview for Hyperallergic as “a worldwide movement, powerful and fictitious, that aims to protect the biological riches of our world through art and science.” The installation presents older and new work, including several of Moffett’s iconic epoxy resin works, which are installed like sentinels on the walls surrounding Golden Bough. Their mirrorlike finishes could also be stand-ins for the artist, and they are certainly markers of time, as they are titled by the day, month, and year they were begun. One is hung at soaring bird height.

There are many surprises for the viewer that should remain just that: surprises. In other words, don’t read too much about NATURE CULT, SEEDED before seeing it. Maybe seek out what Moffett and the exhibition’s curator, Suzette McAvoy, refer to as “a core text” of the installation, The Water Will Come by Jeff Goodall (Simon and Schuster, 2017), or pick up a gallery copy to browse. For Moffett, the notion of cult has a “fearsome, even hairraising” quality, but it also has numbers and intensity embedded in it. Maybe it’s the perfect fiction, the perfect dream of a “huge collective buy-in, pulling us all in as we turn our attention to nature and its preservation.”

NATURE CULT, SEEDED will be on view at the CMCA in Rockland from May 25 to September 8, 2024.