Eco Art Day - Captain Ozone to the Rescue

BELLINGHAM, Washington (Jan 05 2005)

By Burt Stark
Curator
The Toilet Museum

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! No! It's Captain Ozone, and he wants your old toilets.

In the United States, over 7,000,000 toilets are disposed of each year. Most of these are destined to spend the rest of their days in land fills. However, some of these toilets are granted a new lease on life as works of art, thanks to the efforts of the mysterious Captain Ozone and his gang of toilet artists.

Eco Art Day is an annual festival founded by Captain Ozone and crew. In preparation for the festival, toilets put out for garbage disposal are gathered up from sidewalks and alley ways in the Bellingham, Washington area. Then the toilet artists work their magic.

While many artists traditionally apply paint to canvass, the artists who work on Captain Ozone's Eco Art Day project, including Matt Eros, apply their paint to porcelain. The old toilets are painted with themes based on endangered species, toxic waste and outer-inner space environments. These works of art are also made into decorative flower pots, ash trays, and candle holders. Or how about a toilet made to look like the body-exploring submarine in Fantastic Voyage?

Proteus by Matt Eros.

On November 24th, Eco Art Day, Captain Ozone and his merry band of toilet super heros place the finished commodes on business street corners to the delight and confusion of passers-by. After several days of public display, the toilets are then gathered up and given away to people willing to give the refurbished pottys a new home.

It is Captain Ozone's wish that Eco Art Day will spread like water overflowing from a clogged toilet, and that other cities throughout the United States will hold their own Eco Art Days.

You can see some of these works of art here. There is also a documentary about Captain Ozone available for download.