O#3, 2023

While my primary artistic medium is waste plastic I made these pieces as an exploration into the world of architectural ornamentation, specifically wrought iron works that are secured onto buildings, guarding doors and windows, controlling the flow of movement while serving as artistic decoration. This juxtaposition of beauty and control, art and politics is recast using recycled waste plastic - a material with many of it’s own perils and contradictions. By recasting ancient architectural motifs in a very modern material I seek to draw a link between historic systems of art and power and those newer material systems that are proliferated in a super-plastic global capitalism. PINK GRID is a fragmented reference to gridded window coverings found in classical Italian architecture and O#3 is the third in a series of abstracted circular forms, clocks representing the twisting logic of “plastic time.” The two works are made from an experimental process of grafting waste plastic onto sculpted metal frameworks. These steel frames are wrapped in conducting heating wire and are submerged in large vats of waste plastic sourced in Detroit. When an electrical current is run through the wire the metal heats up and the surrounding plastic slowly attaches, like a plasticy flesh growing on a metal skeleton. This technique was developed while I was a student at Cranbrook Academy of Art and debuted as part of the Everlasting Plastic show at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. 

Through a process of grafting plastic waste onto armatures, Simon Anton reinscribes modern functional and political objects into ornamental critiques. He combines designs of the past with the material present to suggest invented and reimagined archeological reconstructions, resituating ornamental detail to recall moments across architectural history within the context of our current plastic proliferation. Drawing from individual and industrial waste streams, Anton creates a material technique that examines circular histories and reimagines possible futures for a world in which waste plastics are increasingly inseparable from the built environment.