Icons Reimagined at The Adelaide Project by TPL
An artist-led takeover of TPL’s Toronto lighting exhibition space explores a more immersive, design-driven approach to specification
What makes a product meaningful is rarely the product alone. More often, it is the setting. Materials, lighting, mood, and the way each element shapes the experience of a space all play a role. Icons Reimagined, presented at The Adelaide Project by TPL (November 2025 to February 2026), puts that idea into practice.
Conceived and curated by SDI Design’s lead creatives, and centred on highlights from HSPLUS’s hospitality furniture collection, this artist-led takeover transforms TPL’s downtown Toronto exhibition space into a series of immersive, narrative-driven vignettes. Rather than presenting products as isolated objects, it frames them within real design scenarios and demonstrates how they perform in context.
Inspired by cultural icons including Andy Warhol and Amy Winehouse, each vignette brings together composition, colour, texture, and illumination with a distinct point of view. The result is highly visual but also instructive, illustrating how furniture, lighting, and materials interact, and how layered design decisions shape atmosphere, perception, and use.
That approach reflects the core intent of The Adelaide Project. As TPL’s experiential lighting studio, the space is designed to move beyond traditional showroom display and support a more intuitive, hands-on understanding of architectural lighting within the broader design process. Icons Reimagined builds on that foundation and demonstrates how an artist-led takeover can function as a tool for dialogue between brands, disciplines, and the design community.
Realized in collaboration with partners including Somato Textiles, Rollout, Paul Petro Contemporary Art, and Interface, the multi-room installation reflects a shared point of view. Strong design emerges through the balance and integration of elements, not their isolation.
This is the value The Adelaide Project brings to Toronto’s design community. It creates space for experimentation, collaboration, and more meaningful engagement with specification. The focus is not just on what a product is, but on how it contributes to the overall experience of a space. Icons Reimagined reinforces a belief central to TPL’s approach. Lighting, and design more broadly, are best understood in application.
Experience it firsthand. Book an appointment today.
