It can be said with some certainty that humans are hardwired to appreciate beauty.

Marketers and especially neuro -marketers know exactly how humans react to color, textures, composition, lighting and even sound. Product and package designers are using many lures to capture you as a market share.

Plastics reign supreme in using beauty to arrest your attention to consume their products. Across the board every product is screaming for your attention dollars. Plastic is designed to capture you. It is sexy and sultry and alluring. It baits you, trolls you, teases you and eventually hooks you.

Plastics are very akin to a beautiful flower such as Foxglove. A stunningly beautiful flower and also extremely poisonous. Plastics as we know them are derived from petrochemicals. They are poisonous.

In return little attention is given for the short life these products have particularly the packaging. Most of what we consume are single stream products. For all their virtues, plastics are toxic. Plastics are forever. In that legacy of forever we are paying the consequences of  plastics real dilemma--Intersectionality and convergence of unknown chemical combos never before seen. This cacophony of chemical hodgepodge is killing the ocean.

My art is born out of the plastic debris crisis. I harvest plastic debris from waterways, particularly ocean plastic debris and other land environments. I selected stock plastic debris like a cabinet maker would select lumber for a fine piece of furniture.

I carefully break down smaller pieces from the stock piece and then begin to fabricate whimsical pieces. Each piece of my sculptures are handmade. Every piece is crafted to exude beauty. As I accumulate many pieces I then start the process to achieve my desired result. It is a painstakingly long process. My sculptures develop organically.

As the sculpture takes shape I am challenged by technical aspects and the individual personalities of each type of plastic. Beauty is one of my main visions to accomplish. Beauty is what captivates the onlooker. I have created a new and bold language that speak to my patrons. I tap into the universal idea of what is beautiful using what otherwise is trash and is headed to a landfill. The success of my art is both a personal and a social anthropological accomplishment.

I have impacted someone’s consciousness to reconsider their contribution to an otherwise very dangerous toll on our bodies and on our natural surroundings.

-Daniel Lanzilotta

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