With paint, glue, a band saw, and a high-powered sander, Matthew Ronay transforms medium density fiberboard (MDF) into colorful sculptural tableau. (MDF is an engineered wood product made by compressing recovered and recycled wood fiber, and because it has no surface grain, it can be painted to a smooth high-gloss finish.)

A master of elliptical, tumbling visual structures, the twenty-nine-year-old Kentuckian received his M.F.A. from Yale, resides in Brooklyn, and works in Long Island City. Increasingly, Ronay’s Tinker Toys brim with blood, guts, and bodily fluids. For instance, earlier installations that included buttered pancakes and a detached leg with sheet music spinning from its toe (70’s Funk Concert Model), argyle socks caught between a hot dog and a gasoline can (Five-Headed Cock In Drag), and a minimalist retelling of the tale of the fox and the grapes (Fable on faux art deco diving board) have given way to blunter, more transgressive material, which may also be Ronay’s most successful work to date. The new pop-Sade subject matter’s most noticeable in his October 2005 solo show at Marc Foxx in Los Angeles and in an upcoming one-person, one-piece exhibition at Esther Schipper in Berlin. (He’s represented by Andrea Rosen Gallery, whose stable includes high profile artists such as Rita Ackerman, Andrea Zittel, and Walker Evans, as well as emerging artists like David Altmejd and José Lerma.)

Regardless of what he’s cobbling together, Ronay enjambs seemingly unconnected objects into a complex narrative sprawl. In a self-interview he conducted for Uncertain States of America, a group show at Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo, Ronay writes, “The work definitely does not illustrate ideas. At least not explicitly concrete ones. It elicits a response. If someone is lazy they would misunderstand the setup as nonsensical or a non sequitur. Instead, what is offered is a chance to create something revealing out of something that is trying to lose its self-consciousness.”

We talked briefly of logistics the night before he flew to Oslo for Uncertain States of America, and continued our discussion upon his return.

—Brandon Stosuy

I. “AT THE END OF ONE OF THESE
PERIODS, PEOPLE LOOSEN UP THEIR
ETHICS AND MORALS AND START TO
GET REALLY DECORATIVE WITH THE
SEX AND TORTURE.”

THE BELIEVER: How was Oslo?

MATTHEW RONAY: I lost four pounds. I ate moose carpaccio in this crazy old hunting bungalow that belongs to the museum’s owner. It was a farmhouse, I guess, which means I lied on my customs application when I said that I wasn’t on a farm or close to livestock. There were lots of great people there who were fun to meet. Some really...