Dozer (né Jeremy Priola)

Raised a self-described “latch-key kid,” in Buffalo, New York, Dozier began conveying his complex feelings about isolation early in life, creating sculptures of concrete left over at his father’s construction sites. 

His father’s prison stints imbued him with an interest in images of authority and taboo: criminality, drug addiction, and gay sexual culture – all themes he would later explore in his art. It also led him to an interest in art itself, in the form prison paintings and tattoos—an affinity that led him, in turn, to study fashion in college. 

After a long career in the industry, he began to feel constrained by the creative limits of wearable pieces, and sought a more physical form of art, such as he’d enjoyed in his youth. A highly tactile person, Dozer credits his ultimate preference for clay to his life-long struggles with hearing and verbal communication. He now finds the working and reworking of his playful, elegant pottery to be the purest mode of expressing his feelings. Of this discovery, he says, “I finally found my voice.”