Matthew Ballantyne: The Life of a Woodcutter

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Matthew Ballantyne, "Undesirable Moral Spillover," 2018-2021

Giclée print on board, framed. Edition of 5 +AP, 24" x 30"

We are pleased to invite you to join us this Saturday, July 10 from 12 - 4pm to celebrate Matthew Ballantyne's first solo exhibition at Mónica Reyes Gallery. 

In The life of a Woodcutter, Ballantyne has collected recent works which take local woodpeckers as a starting point. Expanding out from his practice as a birdwatcher, the inspiration from his wanderings and chance, as well as telegraphed encounters with woodpeckers have found their forms in photographs, sculptures, textiles, and video. Interested in their capacity for destruction and their reputations as nuisances, Ballantyne notes the tension between the petty scapegoating of woodpeckers and the endless justifications of human-based ecological ruin. Much of the work uses overlooked material and photographic traces of these birds in our shared environment to meditate on what it means to find creative impetus, unlikely connections, and moments of transcendence in overlooked places. These places could be splintered piles of dry rot, beak-pocked siding, or emptied-out tree trunks. Spanning histories of amateur naturalism, conceptual art, wildlife photography, and poetry, Ballantyne blends these dispirit but complementary interests to think through the myriad joys, mysteries and heartbreaks involved in sustained attention to a group of beings who, despite our shared material entanglements, can seem to get along just fine without us.

Matthew Ballantyne is an artist, poet and lapsed ironist. His work is preoccupied with birds despite their disinterest in him. His bird-focused works - from photographs to taxidermy, haiku emblazoned on flags to pieces made using found materials - reveal a search for empathy in an enchanted but tragic world.

Ballantyne's bird art releases his subjects from their standard frames, their "cages". His pieces call our attention to our anthropocentric presumption and ignorance, and the upshot is a surprising kindness toward his winged subjects.

He is an artist-naturalist hybrid. The artist and the birdwatcher share much in common. They observe and record. They are patient and persevering, expending long hours in wait. This is a passionate, personal search. Birds can become, as Ballantyne puts it, "poetic and haunting obsessions." Catching sight of a bird and adding it to one's life list is not the end of the story for him. He probes the ecology, natural history, and cultural situation, spotting unexpected linkages between avian and human domains.