If traditional examples of natural beauty are no longer relevant, what might their progeny look like? The detritus of the constructed environment from decaying technologies to new organisms born from a polluted gene pool, forms the backbone of the syntax used in the sculpture by Matthew Ronay.

The reading of the sculptures is a remembrance of analog technologies - rendered in a bright palette of colors that alternates between warmth, desolation, discomfort, and joy. The otherwise abstract works are composed of sinuous forms that emulate the grasping of polluted air, a figure reclining in highly surveilled terrain, caged organisms, intelligent plant life, and mutated musical instruments, radar arrays, and antennae. Thus, the utopias they encapsulate are both welcoming and horrific, peaceful and disruptive, pristine, and diseased.

Matthew Ronay (b. 1976, Louisville, KY) lives in New York. In 2016, his work was the subject of solo- presentations at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, with a fully-illustrated catalog published on the occasion. He has exhibited extensively at major institutions worldwide, including: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK; Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, KY; Kunstverein Lingen, Germany; University of Louisville, KY; Artpace, San Antonio, TX; Serpentine Gallery, London; SculptureCenter, New York; and Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London. Ronay participated in the 2013 Lyon Biennale, curated by Gunnar Kvaran, and the 2004 Whitney Biennial. His works are in private and public collections, including: Kistefos Museum, Norway; ARoS Art Museum, Denmark; Astrup Fearnley, Norway; Dallas Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, MoMA New York and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.