Matthew Ronay's art occupies a space where illustration, tableau, sculpture, and installation all intersect in harmonious indifference to one another. Since 2004, his arrangements of discreet, colorful, mutated objects have evoked wild manifestations of surrealist imagination and hallucinogenic visions, with distended narratives designed to provoke or even outrage viewers through their irreconcilable compositions and outrageous imagery, such as drooping anuses skewered on a pole. Indeed, like Dada and Surrealist artists earlier in the 20th century and American Funk musicians of the 1970s, whose work employed metanarrative, metaphor, provocation, and fantasy as devices for addressing human behavior in times of social upheaval, Ronay's work has been a manifesto of the spirit, screaming back at us with pieces that suggest that fear, pain, and violence have replaced pleasure in a society increasingly indifferent to war and terrorism.

His more recent work might seem like an abrupt departure from these more sensational projects. Brightly colored cartoonish objects have been replaced by muted organic elements rendered in earth tones. Their Primitivist aesthetic shares more with early works by Louise Bourgeois or Martin Puryear than they do with the cartoon antics of Ren and Stimpy. But while the look and feel of his work has shifted, the core concerns have not. If anything, now Ronay has stripped away the elements that link people and things to a specific time and place and has uncovered at a more naked reality, where universal truths might be said to be incapable of disguise.

The final artist in our year-long WindowWorks series tribute to past residents is Leonardo Drew (IAIR 95.4). Throughout his career, Drew has been continuously engaged with the cyclical nature of existence. Made to resemble the detritus of everyday life, his formally abstract but emotionally charged compositions have an aesthetic authority and metaphorical weight that is as unique as it is symbolic, transcending time and place in favor of a celebration of things eternal. His practice can be described as a journey toward enlightenment, full of reprises and returns as well as new beginnings.

Berlin-based artist Henning Bohl's work is an investigation of the language and structure of painting. He often pushes his vividly hued paintings into the realm of sculpture through collaging curled paper onto canvas or utilizing canvas supports in unconventional ways. The artist's playful abstractions recall the compositional strategies of late nineteenth-century Modernists Toulouse-Lautrec and Matisse. Bohl welcomes these comparisons with artists from the past, because he understands the historical weight inherent in contemporary painting. He writes, "It is a sign of the times that there is not really so much left to invent. Whatever you could use is already fraught with predetermined meaning; there's no way around that, and somehow you've got to work with it." Despite this battle with originality, Bohl strives to reinvigorate contemporary painting through a reexamination of past styles.

Roy McMakin's woodwork defies categorization. His skillfully designed tables, chairs, and sofas fit as easily into a domestic space as they do into an art exhibition, and the degree of an object's functionality is often determined by the environment in which it resides. Humor is also a feature of many of the artist's works. In the Duchampian-inspired Untitled (Wooden Toilet) (2005) the artist crafted a commode out of wood, transforming an ordinary functional object into sculpture through an unusual selection of material. Through this type of playful recontextualization, McMakin encourages the viewer to re-examine our emotional and psychological response to common home furnishings.

Adam Schreiber is an Austin-based photographer who mines the potential meanings of cultural artifacts and abandoned corporate spaces. Concerning his philosophy, Schreiber states that he is "more interested in how the medium of photography invents something than how it records something." This is notable given that the source of many of his photographs is local archives-such as the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Harry Ransom Center in Austin-where records of historical importance are collected and preserved. By isolating imagery of outdated technology and sterile laboratory settings from their cultural significance, Schreiber enables the viewer to re-imagine these spaces and objects in new and unexpected ways.