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A TV, books, an ashtray. Maybe a pack of cigarettes, a notebook, a bookcase. What about a transistor radio?

Frank Strunk III just finished a major metal installation at a bank in downtown Tampa. Strunk has made a name for himself as a metalworker, his signature industrial design appearing in financial centers, bars and houses, not to mention the runway, where it’s adorned (quite scantily) the bodies of male and female models. Now, he says, he wants to do something a little more organic, a little softer, more forgiving. For Roundhouse's Four Corners installation show (opening Jan. 23), he’s decided to create a living room—entirely out of wood.

“I love early in the morning when you first come in and you rip through that first piece [of plywood] and you’re covered in sawdust for the rest of the day,” Strunk says, “You can work on metal all day, and you come home, and maybe you smell like welding fumes. But when you’re working on wood all day, you know it. You go home, blow your nose, sawdust comes out. You have sawdust everywhere. It’s in your ears.”

Andrew Lee, co-owner of Roundhouse Creative Studios, which houses the two-month-old Gallery, says the idea for the installation show grew out of his desire, like Strunk, to do something different. Roundhouse’s last show, Type Riot, featured work inspired by the aesthetic of lettering and font. Most of the pieces that appeared in Type Riot were two-dimensional. But Andrew says he and his wife Brooke, the other half of Roundhouse, like making art something the public can interact with.

“It lends itself to multiple mediums,” he says of installation work, “It can have smells, sounds, different points of view.”

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• Photo credit: James Whittinghill

Four Corners is an exhibit unique to its space. Four artists are assigned a corner of the gallery apiece, and asked to create something specifically for that corner. Of course, each corner comes with its own set of needs and possibilities; two of the corners have floor-to-ceiling windows, two of them exterior walls. One of the corners abuts an interior doorway; another’s wall stops halfway to the ceiling. The artists’ task is to work symbiotically with their section of the room.

The process of selecting Four Corners’ artists had a lot to do with the caliber of installations they’ve created in the past. Gali Nieves, for example, specializes in installations and recently collaborated with P$YNNER’s Cindy Psynner on a recyclable tree for Square 1’s Magnum Opus event in November. Anthony Zollo, a Ringling graduate, collaborated with fellow Ringling artist Lynda Bostrom on a 2008 multimedia installation at the Tampa Museum of Art. And Ales ‘Bask’ Hostomsky, who showed in Type Riot along with Strunk, just returned from Miami’s Art Basel.

Then there’s Frank Strunk. “We love Frank’s work,” Andrew says, “He was a no-brainer for us.”

Strunk began his career as a carpenter’s assistant installing windows and hauling lumber, but his artistic track has consisted almost entirely of metal work, twice winning him the Creative Loafing “Best in Wearable Art” awards for his copper and aluminum creations.

For him, though, materials are just that—they’re new sets of possibilities, new tools with which to create: “I’m not limited by anything,” he shouts over the screech of a nearby table saw, “I can make anything out of anything else.”

“I’ve worked with wood forever as a carpenter. I know what can be done with it. Sometimes people are like, ‘Oh, I thought you worked in metal.’ Yeah, but I’m not against working with wood. I don’t know where that comes from.”

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• Gali Nieves collaborayed with P$YNNER to build this recyclable tree for Square 1's Magnum Opus in November

The show’s other artists have chosen their materials just as carefully. Nieves, who insists on repurposing the majority of her materials, is using tea bags as one of three major components for her piece.

“I’m used to creating things and taking them apart,” she says, “and I like reusing the materials as much as I can. I don’t like to be wasteful.” Nieves will be moving to Spain shortly after the show opens to pursue an artistic career overseas.

Anthony Zollo, who is also using plywood, but cut into thin strips, describes the final effect of his piece as, “an explosion of wood,” held together with nails and screws, that may stretch from the floor well out into the middle of the room and across the Studio’s interior doorway, depending on how the building progresses.

“I made rules for myself,” Zollo says, “I can only use plywood, and I can’t paint it.”

Perhaps the most mysterious of the show’s artists is Bask, who calls his installation, “a sort of retrospective,” of the evolution of his work over the past decade. Says Bask, “I will assemble a large group of selected paintings, prints and installations into a single floor-to-ceiling cluster,” including works that have shown and some that have never shown.

Four Corners, opening reception Sat., Jan. 23, 7-11 p.m., open by appointment through Feb. 4, Roundhouse Gallery, 689 Ninth St. N., St. Petersburg, roundhouseart.com; after party, 11 p.m.-2 a.m., Sake Bomb, 187 Ninth St. N., St. Petersburg.