matthew anthony batty was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and grew up in the swamp-light and salt-air of Florida. Their practice is not one thing or another—it is the humus where things meet and cross-pollinate: video seeps into sculpture, sound spills into social space, images molt into installations.

The work lingers in the gap (which is not really a gap) between “nature” and “culture”—a distinction manufactured like Styrofoam, stubborn and sticky. batty’s art hovers in this compost of dark ecology, where mythologies of N__America’s landscapes snag against the hyperobjects of global warming, plastics, capital. Out of the muddiness of these entanglements, speculative ecologies emerge: naturecultures, multispecies kin, possible futures in which human and nonhuman recognize their already-existing intimacy. These works are not solutions, but flickers—fragments of coexistence, pathways toward what Donna Haraway names the Chthulucene, a time of thick, tentacular companionship.

Curation, for batty, is simply another mode of symbiosis. They have curated exhibitions at Spalding University, The Breezeway Gallery, and The Fuller Projects, weaving together assemblages of artists like ecosystems. 

batty received a BFA in Studio Art at Flagler College in St. Augustine, FL and an MFA in Studio Art at Indiana University. Their work has unfolded across national and international stages—Mana Contemporary (Chicago), Atlanta Contemporary, Front Views Gallery (Berlin), and the New Orleans Film Festival (commissioned installation, Andy Warhol Foundation). Residencies include the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, Black Vulture Project, The Weight of Mountains (Yukon Territory), and the Center for Rural Engagement.matthew anthony batty was also an original member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Greenville Chapter), a national network of artist-run spaces, extending their practice into a larger mesh of collaborative creation.

Now living and working in St. Petersburg, Florida, batty inhabits the humid threshold where gulf waters, concrete, and mangroves press against one another—an ecology of entanglement that continues to seep into the work.

artist statement

Hum_nity and nature aren’t two things.
They never were. We’re in the same room, breathing the same stale air,
tracking mud across the same cracked tile. 

My work grows in the compost of this fact, out of the heat that hangs in the Southern air,
out of the mud that never really dries.

I look for the fingerprints of global warming—
in the way water pools,
in the way a tree line shifts,
in the way animals carry themselves.

The landscapes I belong to are heavy and swampy,
Southern fields where heat sticks to your shirt
and the cicadas sing like a broken neon sign.
Here, I try to peel back the stories we tell ourselves—
that humans are separate, that we are in charge,
that this age is ours alone.

What I make—videos, projections, sculptures,
stray objects collected from the roadside,
sounds that feel like warnings or prayers—
are just ways of holding that entanglement up to the light.

The Anthropocene feels like a big word.
But on the ground it looks like
a creek running low,
a power line buzzing in the heat,
a plastic bottle half-buried in clay.

The work imagines how we might live after “the end,”
after the Anthropocene slogan fades from the billboard,
when we’re just another species
walking shoulder to shoulder
through the damp and unfinished world.