José Luis Torres: DECONSTRUCTION

Sculpture Garden at Industrial Arts 2026

DECONSTRUCTION, on site installation process. Photo: Yuluo Wei/Steelcase Art Projects

DECONSTRUCTION
José Luis Torres

Curated by Yuluo Wei

June 6 – November 16, 2026
Public Opening Reception: Saturday, June 6, 2026, 1 – 3pm
Industrial Arts Sculpture Garden, 248 Steelcase Road East, Markham (Free onsite parking)

Steelcase Art Projects (SAP) is proud to present DECONSTRUCTION, a new site-specific installation by José Luis Torres, opening this spring in Industrial Arts’ Sculpture Garden.

A door removed from its frame is no longer a door in any functional sense. But it continues carrying memory: the threshold it marked, the household it divided, the hands that passed through it over years. José Luis Torres collects these objects and puts them back to work in a different way.

For DECONSTRUCTION, Torres has assembled salvaged locally sourced doors and windows into a kind of structure that sits between assembly and disassembly, between a building coming together and one coming apart. Torres is deliberate about this ambiguity, mirroring the condition he has been examining for over two decades: what it means to inhabit a place without fully belonging to it.

Born in Argentina and based in Quebec, Torres is not making work about migration. He works in the same mode as migration: gathering what’s available, improvising a structure, making do. A person who survives in a foreign place and a work of art surviving in a space operate by the same logic; both begin with what the site offers and what it withholds. Both are shaped by that negotiation, and reshape it in turn.

Inside DECONSTRUCTION, old windows and doors overlap to frame Markham’s industrial landscape. The parking lot outside becomes a view. The familiar becomes strange, and the strange becomes, briefly, shelter.

The installation continues Industrial Arts’ strong commitment to public art that engages context and community. Rain or shine, join us for the launch on Saturday, June 6 at 1pm. The event is free and all are welcome.

About the Artist

José Luis Torres was born in Argentina and has been living and working in Québec since 2003. He has a bachelor’s degree in visual arts, a master’s degree in Sculpture and a degree in Architecture. His public interventions and exhibitions have marked the artistic landscape both in Canada and abroad. In 2026, he is a featured artist at the OpenArt Public Art Biennial in Örebro, Sweden. His extensive career includes presentations at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Kelowna Art Gallery, Museum London (Ontario), and the UCCS Gallery of Contemporary Art (USA). Internationally, he has exhibited at Human Cities/Places to be (Brussels), the X-Border Art Biennial (Finland), and has participated in numerous residencies across Europe, China, and the Americas. A recipient of the Prix CALQ – Work of the Year, Torres continues to use the persistence of matter to question the narratives that resist erasure.

Torres’ work probes the interdependent relationship between humans and their environment. By transforming a profusion of domestic objects and residual materials into contemporary vestiges, he does not focus on the end-of-life of debris, but rather on inventing new destinies for it. His site-specific installations often adopt an invasive aesthetic, grafting themselves onto existing architecture to become one with the landscape—a commentary on the material proliferation inherent in our consumer society. Hovering between utopia and dystopia, his creations celebrate a “do-it-yourself” culture and the radical ingenuity that flourishes in times of crisis. His approach also explores three notions central to the migratory experience: construction, adaptation, and reflection. Through systematic reuse and artisanal construction methods, he creates spaces of friction where displacement reveals fragility. His works are never finished objects but rather open processes, reflecting the state of precariousness and perpetual reinvention intrinsic to the human condition and the immigrant journey.

Steelcase Art Projects
200 Steelcase Road East
Markham ON L3R 1G2
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Accessibility: The public art space is accessible.

Industrial Arts is a 5-acre site comprising multiple industrial units in Markham, hosting tenants involved in light manufacturing processes. Home to Steelcase Art Projects, we are a social enterprise that supports artists by providing affordable studios, commissions, acquisitions, collaborations, mentorship, business advice and other opportunities alongside industrial businesses. Industrial Arts is Markham’s Creative Heart.

Steelcase Art Projects is a not-for-profit organization and the programming arm of Industrial Arts. Our mission is to transform Industrial Arts into a site for artistic experimentation through collaborations, commissions and projects. Working with our tenants and with the surrounding community, we are connecting business to the arts through unconventional collaborations in the industrial realm.