Anthony Rokin is a Street Artist Who Makes Art by Recycling Advertising Posters

12:34 PM PDT on October 1, 2013

Artist Anthony Rokin collects paper from all over the Los Angeles, then organizes it depending on location, color, etc. and uses it to create new works of art that comment on the very materials he recycles, and their place in the urban landscape. The piece above, from the arts district in downtown LA, mostly consists of advertising posters from Hollywood (one of the artist's main sources for recycled paper).

Some of his pieces are site specific to emphasis a particular place, while others can emphasis movement throughout the city and the neverending parade of advertisements strung up at street level. The posters he gathers are often from the wooden temporary "fences" around construction sites and empty lots, or telephone poles. Individual pieces of collected paper can vary from small flyers to 8 x 10 ft sheets of layered poster.

Rokin d0esn't recycle other street art, although at times it gets mixed in naturally since some artists post work in advertising spaces and paper sticks together. According to the artist, it's not about the specific ads, it's about the paper itself and how it serves as "malleable flesh that is receptive to the variety of forces in the urban environment". He often returns to the piece multiple times to tear away and re-attach layers of paper, emphasizing the transient nature of anything put up in the city and thus subject to its environment.

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