CAN Journal   |  October 27, 2025

Confronting Our Wastescapes: Everlasting Plastics in Cleveland

by Rebekah Utian

Two thousand years ago, a story circulated in the ancient Roman world about a moldable, yet unbreakable, material unlike anything that had come before. In the 7th century, the bishop scholar Isidore of Seville featured this tale in his Etymologies:

They claim that under Tiberius Caesar a certain craftsman devised a formula for glass so that it would be flexible and pliable. And when he was brought before Caesar he presented a drinking bowl to him, and Caesar indignantly threw it to the floor. The craftsman picked the drinking bowl up from the floor, where it had been dented as a bronze vessel would be. The craftsman took a small hammer from his pocket and reshaped the drinking bowl. When he had done this, Caesar said to him, ‘Does anyone else know this method of making glass?’ After the craftsman swore that no one else knew, Caesar ordered him beheaded, lest, if this skill became known, gold would be regarded as mud and the value of all metals would be reduced – and it is true that if glass vessels became unbreakable, they would be better than gold and silver.

What was once a medieval reflection on the established hierarchy of material value now carries uncanny resonance as we confront the consequences of plastic proliferation in contemporary life. Against this backdrop, SPACES welcomes Everlasting Plastics to Cleveland, following its debut at the U.S. Pavilion of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale and subsequent showing at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Curators Tizziana Baldenebro and Lauren Leving conceived the exhibition as a nuanced exploration of humanity’s entanglement with plastic. Rather than succumbing to the reductive impulse to categorically condemn plastic, Everlasting Plastics foregrounds the material’s inherent contradictions, favoring reflection over resolution.

The exhibition features five artists and designers from across the United States, including Simon Anton (Detroit-based designer), Norman Teague (Chicago-based designer and educator), Lauren Yeager (Cleveland-based sculptor), Ang Li (Assistant Professor, Northeastern University School of Architecture), and Xavi Aguirre (Assistant Professor of Architecture, MIT). Together, their work invites viewers into a complex emotional terrain, oscillating between allure and repulsion, nostalgia and guilt.

Simon Anton’s work incorporates defective children’s toys that have been ground into unrecognizable, multi-color fragments. By layering toy scraps onto metal armatures that echo functional and political forms, Anton transforms plastic waste into the ornamental ‘flesh’ of his sculptures that are both aesthetically playful and deliver pointed critique. Although reduced to mere particles, these plastics retain a residual, chromatic joy, as demonstrated when a child in Venice instinctively ran over to play with the sand-like microplastics, underscoring the material’s paradoxical allure.

Norman Teague’s series of confectionery-colored vessels for Everlasting Plastics offers another point of entry to the latent potential of plastic refuse. Recasting modern waste into time-honored forms through collaboration and experimentation. Teague transforms plastics into compelling artworks modelling Bolga and Agaseke basket-weaving techniques. While critiquing histories of Western pollution and extractivism in the Global South, Teague also demonstrates that plastic waste can be reconstituted as a hopeful resource rather than an irreparable problem.

Lauren Yeager, by contrast, pushes viewers toward discomfort. Interestingly, her work has elicited some of the most resistance from audiences and critics. Yeager’s assemblages employ commonplace assortments of refuse, such as weathered cooler boxes, yellowing polystyrene, and Igloo water coolers; however, extracted from their original context, these salvaged plastics transform into the relic-like building blocks for sculptures that balance banality and monumentality. For some audiences, these forms might echo mid-century visions of the American Dream, wherein families picnicked outdoors alongside plastic-wrapped modern conveniences. For others, this eerie nostalgia might feel insufficient, even evasive. Regardless of one’s interpretation, provocation endures in the unassuming beauty Yeager cultivates by elevating waste materials to fine art status.

By tracing Cleveland’s systems of disposal, Yeager gestures toward cycles of consumption in which our city remains enmeshed. In Venice, visitors could observe these works with a degree of detachment, even voyeurism; in Ohio, where plastic is inextricably intertwined with the region’s identity, Yeager’s work reads more as a demand for reckoning.

At SPACES, curators Pita Brooks and Thea Spittle reconfigured the Biennale’s site-specific installations to fit the gallery’s more intimate footprint, orchestrating an innovative spatial interplay that accentuates the resonances between the exhibitors. In Cleveland, visitors move fluidly between Anton’s wall-mounted sculptures, Teague’s assortment of plastic baskets, and Yeager’s towering assemblages, experiencing the exhibition not as discrete statements, but as an ongoing dialogue.

The rearrangement at SPACES also casts new light on the work of Ang Li and Xavi Aguirre. Barely fitting in the gallery, Li’s compressed polystyrene (EPS) foam wall juxtaposes the existing brick-and-mortar skeleton of SPACES Gallery. This material of the “future” quite literally became a part of the building’s architectural fabric, necessitating the removal of several air ducts to accommodate its installation. Li’s work conveys a poetics of occupying space, both physically and conceptually, highlighting that we cannot ignore the persistence of plastic.

Xavi Aguirre elaborates on this concept by pairing dystopian digital landscapes with sculptural interventions that reveal what is usually hidden beneath walls. If Li’s work emphasizes the imposing presence of plastic, Aguirre underscores its infiltration into unseen spaces and systems, making visible our dependence on plastic as a source of protection and comfort.

Many aspects of the Venetian installation have been preserved. For example, the bilingual didactic panels carry with them the exhibit’s intercontinental provenance and imbue the space with an ethos of material conservation. Circular design lies at the core of Everlasting Plastics,

advancing the ethos of keeping materials in circulation rather than consigning them to waste. Despite the show’s departure from its site-specific arrangement at the Biennale, Everlasting Plastics continues to spark fresh, critical dialogue, this time through its Cleveland homecoming.

Returning to the tale of the ancient craftsman and his indestructible glass, Caesar may have been prescient in wishing to eradicate such an outstanding material. Yet, history shows us that once introduced, such substances cannot be simply erased. In the same way, Everlasting Plastics does not ask us to make peace with plastic, but it offers a powerful invitation to reexamine our entanglements, recognize our dependence, and imagine possible futures in a world already irrevocably shaped by this all-pervading material.

Everlasting Plastics
Curated by Tizziana Baldenebro and Lauren Leaving
September 26, 2025 – January 17, 2026
SPACES Gallery
2900 Detroit Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio 44113
216.621.2314

Original Article