Playful Portrayals of Consumption

José Luis Torres, Trojan Horse, 2024. Photograph by Au7umn.

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.