Fri 9/26 @ 6-9PM

It was quite a coup when SPACES gallery director Tizziana Baldenebro and moCa curator Lauren Leving were chosen to curate the U.S. Pavilion at 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, which ran from May 20 through November 23. Their exhibition, Everlasting Plastics, focused on “the ways [plastics] both shape and erode contemporary ecologies, economies, and the built environment,” as interpreted by five diverse artists from Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan and Cleveland, Ohio.

The artists who created site-specific installations included Xavi Laida Aguirre, assistant professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Detroit-based designer Simon Anton; Ang Li, assistant professor in the School of Architecture at Northeastern University; Norman Teague, assistant professor of industrial design in the School of Design at the University of Illinois Chicago; and Cleveland sculptor/conceptual artist Lauren Yeager.

Obviously not many Clevelanders could make the trip to Venice to see the show. But Everlasting Plastics did have a run last year at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Now it’s coming home: it opens at SPACES gallery this weekend.

“Each work considers our relationship with plastics, encouraging discussion about the ways the material both shapes and erodes contemporary ecologies, economies, and the built environment, while also suggesting potential alternatives and necessary re-imaginings for the ways in which plastics are deployed,” says the press release.. “Rather than offering a straightforward critique, Everlasting Plastics considers the material’s cultural pervasiveness and the entangled, often paradoxical connection we share with it.”

The show opens at SPACES with a free, public reception on Friday September 26. It will be on view through January 17.

spacescle.org/everlasting-plastics