A towering new art installation is coming to the Kelowna Art Gallery, British Columbia
HANDMADE, a towering new art installation is coming to the Kelowna Art Gallery, British Columbia. May 10, 2025, to May of 2026.
In this new site-specific work, artist José Luis Torres explores the dynamic relationship between location, materials, and the viewer. His practice appropriates space and materials from everyday life, using spontaneity and accumulation to reflect on themes of immigration and survival. Through playful, evolving environments, Torres challenges conventional exhibition norms, drawing inspiration from the unique characteristics of each site.
HANDMADE examines the paradoxical nature of objects—valued as both essential and incidental—through acts of construction and deconstruction. Made from salvaged windows and doors, the sculpture resembles a collage: a series of portals, each opening into its own universe. The work is a reflection on the artist’s experience as an immigrant to Canada, and a meditation on life as something in progress and always under construction.
José Luis Torres is an Argentine artist based in Québec City since 2003. He holds degrees in visual arts, sculpture, and architecture. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including at Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Museum London, and the UCCS Gallery of Contemporary Art. His art explores the fluid and evolving nature of immigrant identity.
https://kelownaartgallery.com/handmade/
A new artwork by Jose Luis Torres presented at the Churchill Square in Edmonton, Alberta
TROJAN HORSE presented at the Churchill Square in Edmonton, Alberta. Temporary large-scale installation for The Works Art & Design Festival 2024.
Playful Portrayals of Consumption
An integral part of a thriving capitalist economy is its reliance on the continual production, circulation, and consumption of goods. Yet, such consumption depends on people who have the means to pay for these goods as well as for the goods’ planned obsolescence, which incentivizes and makes it necessary for people to purchase more. Quebec-based artist José Luis Torres explores these types of issues in an unconventional manner with his contribution Trojan Horse to this year’s The Works Art and Design Festival.
People may recall Torres’ work site-specific installations Canopy (2016) and Tangible (2019), both of which appeared in previous years of The Works festival. Those installations are characterized by their colourfulness and incorporation of common objects, which make them more accessible for people to experience. Similarly, Torres’ latest work Trojan Horse takes recognizable, everyday objects that people may not expect to find in art and transforming them into a colourful public spectacle. Apart from the accompanying signage, Trojan Horse does not embody any conventional markers that would indicate it is a work of art, so people may walk by or through it initially without realizing what they are looking at. At the same time, the installation is eye-catching due to its unlikely combination of recognizable items from people’s everyday contexts.
With two grey shipping containers situated parallel to each other on the ground, two additional shipping containers sit on top of them and are angled upwards diagonally towards the sky, with their top ends open. Emerging from these containers’ open ends is a proliferation of common objects, which almost appear as if they are spewing out of the two crates with great abandon. Mimicking an archway, these items are bound together into a colourful arc that may remind one of a rainbow. The objects are predominantly plastic in nature and the majority of them consist of chairs of various colours. Other items in the installation include a ladder, a couple of boats, a portable basketball hoop, and yellow wooden planks.
Chairs are one of the most ordinary and ubiquitous of domestic objects, while shipping containers are a recognizable object that symbolizes a capitalist economy that depends on the mass circulation of commodities to consumers around the world. In a playful and parodic fashion, the sheer number of chairs and other objects in his installation accentuates the excessiveness of capitalist-driven production, pervasiveness of consumption, and people’s complicity with this economic system through their actions. However, Torres conveys ideas such as these without being didactic. By extricating items from the usual contexts in which they appear and combining them together unexpectedly, Torres makes his installation more approachable by reconstituting these objects in a playful and parodic fashion within a highly visible public space. In doing so, Torres invites people to reflect on their relationships with the objects contained within the installation, through which they can draw their own conclusions about it.
https://www.theworks.ab.ca/newsfeed/playful-portrayals-of-consumption