With "Hinoki" (2007, Art Institute of Chicago), Ray had a mold made of a large rotting tree he found in California. He then hired a team of Japanese woodcarvers in Osaka to essentially re-carve the tree in Hinoki, a different wood than that of the original tree. In an interview with Michael Fried, Ray made it clear that the purpose of the piece was not to photorealistically carve an exact replica of the tree. "The tree had that beautiful interior that fallen logs have," he says. "It happens when bugs eat out the hard wood, so you have this hollow thing. All I knew was that I wanted to carve that, I wanted them to have a sense of that interior [of the log] because it's in there, even if normally it couldn't be seen. So that was really important. And then I became involved with the outside as well…It mattered to me that somebody had looked at it, and I wanted to make it matter to you." Ray's critically acclaimed "Firetruck" (1993), a full-size aluminum, fiberglass and Plexiglas installation, has been exhibited on Madison Avenue in New York, in front of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The giant replica of a red toy firetruck was also exhibited outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008. In 2009, Ray installed "Boy with Frog", his first outdoor commissioned work, at the Punta della Dogana, Venice. Grand in size and realized with a smooth white finish that references the important tradition of marble sculpture in Italy, it depicted a boy holding a goliath frog above the Grand Canal. The sculpture called to mind the "Apollo Sauroktonos", an ancient Roman sculpture at the Musée du Louvre in Paris of a nude adolescent reaching out his arm to catch a lizard climbing a tree; and, the "Boy with Thorn (Lo Spinario)", a bronze statue at the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Musei Capitolini, of a seated Roman boy plucking a thorn from the sole of his foot. The statue was removed in 2013 and replaced with a lamp-post that had previously occupied the site. Ray’s first work in stone, "Two Horses" (2019), is a relief carved from a single block of Virginia granite and weighs more than six tons. Ray had his first one-person museum exhibition in 1989 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now Orange County Museum of Art). His art has since been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Europe and North America, including a traveling, mid-career retrospective organized by Paul Schimmel for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which then traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art.