Raymon Elozua

Raymon Elozua’s clay career began with functional pots but quickly moved to create post-industrialist ceramic sculptures incorporating metal and clay components. Following trends in photo-realism, he modeled sculptures of deteriorating American industrial architecture including, water towers, industrial sites, billboards, and drive-in movie theatres.

Elozua used these sculptures as a way to comment on the socio-economic consequences of industrial decline and its effect on American blue collar workers of the 1980s. Using a combination of open metal forms and colorfully glazed components, Elozua created a series of deconstructed teapots, bottles and traditional pottery forms.

In the 1990s Elozua used a computer to scan iconic paintings and separate their colors into individual layers. He then created a collage from selected layers of scans from different paintings. Each collage was then studied, interpreted and sculpted into a wire and clay mixed media sculpture. These works were titled to reference the artists whose work was used in layers of the original collages.

During his career, Elozua produced a large body of photographic images of weathering objects and buildings. With Allan Chasanoff, Elozua created the Amazing Grace Collection of 3,000 recorded performances of "Amazing Grace," now held by The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

A digital exhibition of Elozua's work, first shown May 10 - August 3, 2003, at the Mint Museum of Craft + Design, is available at http://www.mintmuseum.org/elozua/.