Cleveland.com  |  October 27, 2025

Plastics have an ‘Everlasting’ impact on environment, psyche in sobering SPACES art exhibition

By Peter Chakerian, cleveland.com

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The latest exhibition on view at SPACES — “Everlasting Plastics” — offers more than just an art show. It’s the right thing for right now and so pertinent to what our watershed has been through during the last century.

What appears at first glance to be vibrantly colored sculptural and design works quickly reveals itself as a layered exploration of material, industry, inevitability.

Originally commissioned for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale and now back home in Cleveland, the show opened at the end of September and remains open through Saturday, Jan. 17, 2026.

Curated by Tizziana Baldenebro and Lauren Leving, “Everlasting Plastics” gathers work from five artists and designers — Xavi L. Aguirre, Simon Anton, Ang Li, Norman Teague and Cleveland-based sculptor Lauren Yeager — each probing our enmeshed relationship to plastic, its production and disposal.

Simon Anton's plastic-coated barricades are one of the stunning fixtures in "Everlasting Plastics" at Spaces Gallery.Peter Chakerian, Cleveland.com

At its heart, the show is a meditation on contradiction. Plastics were once hailed as miracle materials — affordable, durable and democratizing — yet today their proliferation presents dire consequences.

As the curatorial text notes, plastics were “embraced as a revolutionary material” but are now produced at “alarmingly exponential rates,” with the result that our waterways, landfills and shores bear the imprint of our cheap conveniences.

To put it another way entirely: we are our own worst enemy and corporations are all too happy to let us ruin ourselves (and our environment) in the name of progress, propinquity and profit.

For Cleveland in particular, there’s local resonance.

Ohio ranks second nationally in plastics-industry employment and the city lies on the Lake Erie watershed — so plastic’s presence here isn’t theoretical, it’s instantaneous and why Cuyahoga River kayakers like Eddie “Trash Fish” Olshansky can haul hundreds of pounds out of the water every a day.

Walking among the pieces, one senses a dialogue between architecture, design and sculpture. The symbolic similarities between stacked plastic coolers and skyscrapers, for example, should be lost on no one.

"Everlasting Plastics" was curated by Tizziana Baldenebro, the former executive director of Spaces gallery in Cleveland, with Lauren Leving.

Aguirre brings an architectural designer’s lens; Anton converts post-consumer plastic into new form via his Detroit-based collective; Li works at the intersection of architecture and circular design; Teague mines urbanism and community building through salvaged materials and Yeager re-imagines common detritus as sculptural forms.

Teague’s extruded recycled plastic series “Re+Prise,” in particular, offers some sense of what said detritus, flotsam and jetsam might become in the future. It’s a nice bit of hope underpinning the sobering scope here.

Together the works ask: What happens when a material defined by disposability (and informed by capitalism-induced dissociation) becomes, in effect, permanent?

How might we re-frame our use of plastic not just as waste, but as architecture of our own making?

The show doesn’t merely issue a moral condemnation; there’s plenty to worry about here. Instead, it invites a more complex awareness — that our dependency is embedded, that the existential anxiety about it is real, but also that our possibilities are open to change it.

As a viewer, you might pause at Yeager’s sculptural elevation of the cast-off, then turn and find Teague’s layered materiality asking you to reconsider surface and structure, then move on to Anton’s reclaimed polyethylene forms that question value, labor and resource.

The interplay is subtle but sustained: each piece feeds into the next, creating a spatial and conceptual rhythm.

The work of Li, Aguirre and Cleveland’s Yeager are perhaps the most striking.

The latter’s sculptural approach to using discarded plastic as-is invites a cornucopia of thoughts that won’t leave a viewer anytime soon. As monuments. As skyscrapers. As totems, factotum.

The former’s “Externalities” done in EPS (expanded polystyrene) foam is staggering in volume and “architecture of accumulation.” And Aguirre’s “Proofing,” a multimedia meditation, is haunting.

Pictures don’t do them justice. In-person scale does.

If you’re planning a visit, note the gallery hours: Wednesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Whether you stay for a quick walk or linger to absorb resonance, the show rewards attention. You’ll be talking about it across the street over a drink long after you leave.

In a time when the term “single-use” has become a symbol of ecological excess, “Everlasting Plastics” reminds us that permanence — however unwanted — is our alibi as much as it is our (un)invited guest.

This exhibition is not only about what plastic has done, but how we might imagine what it could become.

SPACES Gallery, 2900 Detroit Ave., Cleveland. 216-621-2314, spacescle.org.

Peter Chakerian

Cleveland.com Life & Culture Editor / Managing Producer Peter Chakerian has been called one of the region's "most interested" people. The award-winning writer, author and journalist has been featured in dozens of publications and online news organizations across the country. In over 30 years, his career has garnered several awards, including "Best in Ohio" nods for online journalism by the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists. A graduate of Cleveland State University, Chakerian is the author of several books and has been a regular contributor to The Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com since the 1990s.

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