For more than 40 years, Raymon Elozua has maintained a career largely outside of the commercial art world, forging his own path in creative and enduring ways. After a brief introduction to clay in a class with Ruth Duckworth at the University of Chicago, he moved to New York in the 1970s and built a studio. In 1979, he began showing photorealistic miniature ceramic sculptures of dilapidated wooden structures- water towers, billboards, even an entire amusement park- at OK Harris. These works were enthusiastically received, but Elozua decided to move on, pursuing the Lost Labor project, a vast archive of images of American workers from 1900 to 1980, and Home Scrap, an extensive study of defunct steel mills in the Northeast and Midwest. Eventually, he relocated to the Catskills hamlet of Mountaindale, New York. There, he found the remains of Borscht Belt resorts, casinos, and bungalows, as well as the egg industry—all left behind by the tides of economic and social change. For several years, he documented these modern ruins, publishing a series of online books featuring haunting photographic images while continuing to experiment with sculptural materials in unorthodox ways. Elozuas retrospective Structure/Dissonance at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, is on view through December 31, 2022.
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