Q&A: Matthew Ronay

Equally political and colourful, Ronay nonetheless abandoned this style by the end of the decade and began developing more integrated and muted environments that suggested phenomenological and anthropological influences. ‘Between the Worlds’, Ronay’s most recent exhibition at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, is the consummation of these disparate impulses: an Arcadian haunt that combines the forest floor with the cosmic interiors of a theme-park ride, a kind of Bachelardian entanglement of nature and artifice.

ERIK MORSE: What were the major artistic, cultural and personal influences that led you to create ‘Between the Worlds’? For me, this installation – if I can call it that – represents a secret lineage of ‘interior artists’ whose work in decorative arts, bricolage and artificial interiority include the earliest purveyors of Wunderkammer and dioramas, certain examples of trompe l’oeil and phantasmagoria, 20th-century auteurs like Georges Méliès and Busby Berkeley, early Hollywood set designers, artists including Cornell, Duchamp, Schwitters, Ed Kienholz and Tim Burton, as well as people like Sean Lally and Ernest Neto, all of whom have experimented in a discipline that is hard to define – namely, environmental or atmospheric installation.

MR: A lot of times I can’t remember the things that inspire me… They float up inside me and transform me then disappear. Design-wise, I adore that static of Islamic patterns. Especially the tile work that I have seen in Topkapı Palace [in Istanbul]: patterns on top of patterns all created with an idea of interwovenness. The kilim’s design and the process in which it is made are inseparable. Also the patterns are often referring to actual tales and function as a mnemonic device.

Joseph Cornell was my favourite artist from 16 to 20 – early on, I made boxes/constructions heavily inspired by him. I can’t remember ever having been so excited to see a work in person. It wasn’t so much that work in particular but just to see one of the boxes in person was amazing.

But the overall inspiration for ‘Between the World’ was more of a ‘feeling’ of space, an atmosphere: a forest in the night, lit by the moon, fog, on the verge of discovery and transformation. Low lighting is ideal for sculpture I think sometimes because it allows things to develop in space as you approach – kind of like fog does – meaning as you approach something it is easily misunderstood or difficult to see until you are upon it.

EM: Relatedly, I would say that there appears to be a shared or common artistic ‘procedure’ in your recent works that favors sculpture or installation that is immersive – often imagined or visualized through the experience of natural scapes, like the dark forest, the deep ocean, the thinly oxygenated ionosphere. I wonder how, for you, the ‘feeling’ of immersion is translated in terms of craft?

MR: I think the desire to immerse, envelope, or be bound comes from the year I spent doing sensory deprivation. The process of doing sensory deprivation consists of lying in a tank of highly salted water that is body temperature in complete darkness. What at first seems claustrophobic melts into a feeling of body disappearance. You are totally left to yourself and aim, I suppose, to leave it behind. I originally started doing the deprivation because I had heard that it invoked hallucinations, but after a couple of sessions, I found that it was much more useful as a meditation inducer.

Although at first the piece was envisioned as a type of tableau, in the end, the more I added to it, the more I think it became a place to calm down, much like the isolation tank.

EM: And is part of the pleasure of being enveloped in such a landscape also largely an effect of its inherent artifice or simulation of place, of somewhere else?

MR: Much in the same way that a dream allows you to experiment with things that may be off limits in awake time, the artificial forest allows you the limited scope of things to consider. A forest has infinite possibilities and therefore could cancel itself out in terms of attention span for some. I think in general the idea is to keep your mind enthralled and amazed with the details while keeping it on the bigger picture. Nature provides this framework perfectly and though everyone knows that it is an endless well of harmony and enrapturing immersion it often takes a dissociative to start the engine.

EM: Does nostalgia or memory play a important role in the installation?

MR: In terms of memory or nostalgia, I think my younger years of sharing the basement with my older brother may have had a lasting effect on me. A basement for a teenager is a cave haven of narcotic-like sleep and privacy. My brother made psychedelic murals on the ceiling and light sculptures in the alcoves with Christmas lights and bed sheets. We also covered a large drop cloth in stencils of Malcolm McDowell’s eye from A Clockwork Orange. The whole space was a trippy interior experiment with moody lighting and chill out coves… I hadn’t put the two things next to each other but I think it may have been one of my earliest experiences with space transformation.

EM: Were you a devotee of the haunted house as a child? There’s something about the installation that reminds me of the way that a carnival ride or haunted house might be sectioned off spatially to construct small, interconnected tableaux or ‘rooms’, which create a kind of miniature or occluding effect.

MR: Two memories that stick out to me are – first, one of those tiny haunted houses on a flatbed that they have at state fairs, or at least the ones back in the early ’80s. You sit in a little bumper car and go around exactly as you described above. For me, though, the experience was heightened when one of the automated figure that jump out actually punched me in the face. Second was the haunted house at Disney World. It makes great use of scrims and space change. It blew me away as a child. What’s nice about a haunted house is that it enhances your perception to a level that even the slightest movement or development is monumental.

EM: I’ve read numerous critics who have used the descriptors tribal and shamanic to contextualize ‘Between the Worlds’, and while I would not argue with these labels, I’m more intrigued by the way you flirt with concepts of ‘home’ and ‘worlds’, which, to me, are much less reductive than appealing to some form of atavism.

MR: I agree that tribal and shamanic can be limiting, but so can imaginative and whimsical. Whereas shamanic implies a usefulness that excites me. I do not think I am a shaman, of course, but I find that older works, or works from more isolated cultures have a great connection with use. ‘Between the Worlds’ hasn’t been made with hundreds years of tradition directly shaping its content and it isn’t digested or followed in an organized way, therefore can’t be used in the way a church or mosque can be for contemplation. But in a way it can be used to turn on the switch of observation and contemplation of this world and its reflection in another dream world that it is parallel to.

EM: While walking through the installation, I felt as though I were floating on the surface of some faraway planet. Yet I never felt exposed or ‘homeless’. Could you tell me a bit about how such ideas of ‘home’ and ‘world’ shaped how you schematized the space of the installation?

MR: A common way of organizing space for me has always been the order in which things are made in the studio. My studio wasn’t big enough to fit the entire piece inside it so some things had to me packed up and replaced by new things. Over time this created the general placement of the object inside the installations. I think that an idea of world that is essential is balance. This is the theme of lots of different spiritual places and people – that it must have a mirror or opposite to work its magic. Therefore it is at once above and below, safe and dangerous, light and dark. The place that is most intriguing to me is the space right in-between where they are intertwined… I believe this can be described as ‘non-dual’.