Pasadena mechanic turns scrap metal into art

PASADENA, Calif. - Inside a family mechanic shop that has served the community for nearly 50 years, Tro Khayalian works with steel, heat, noise and muscle. 

He bends pipe. He fixes exhaust systems. He stands among old bolts, worn parts, scraps of metal and tools marked by grease and repetition. 

Then he transforms those same materials into something else. He makes sculpture out of what other people leave behind.

The shop sits at the center of his life. His father and uncle built the business after immigrating from Syria. 

Khayalian grew up there, surrounded by repair work, family rhythm and the rough poetry of a place where damaged things come in and leave whole again. 

That history matters because his art rises from the same instinct. 

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He does not separate labor from imagination. He does not treat the shop as one life and sculpture as another. The metal, the memory and the family story all travel together.

He says the shop shaped him early, not only as a worker but as someone who learned to see discarded things differently. A car part did not have to remain a car part. A broken object could hold another shape inside it. That way of seeing now drives a body of work that transforms scrap metal, hardware and even kitchen utensils into art that feels both personal and hard-won. 

"I’ve grown up here in the shop," Khayalian said. "I also love doing art."

That instinct never really left him. It deepened with time. What others might pass over as useless, he studies for line, weight, tension and possibility. 

The castoff object becomes raw material for memory and invention. 

"I used to see car parts differently when I was younger," he said. "I get more satisfaction out of scrap metal car parts in my sculptures when I create them. Nothing is junk to me."

Friends and relatives now save pieces for him, handing him spoons, screws, nails and scraps because they know he may find life in them again.

"All of a sudden you see friends and family with a bucket with their old spoons," he said. "'Hey, make something out of this.' I use nails, screws, bolts, nuts, anything that I could get my hands on."

By day, Khayalian handles exhaust systems, a trade that calls for control, force and an intimate feel for metal. 

He bends tubing and piping with the practiced precision of someone who knows where a stubborn material will resist and where it will give. That work demands patience and touch. 

It also helps explain why his sculptures carry such a strong physical presence. They do not feel imagined from a distance. They feel handled, wrestled with and coaxed into form. In his world, the mechanic’s workbench and the artist’s table sit close together. 

The same eye that studies line and curve in metal for function studies it again for meaning.

"My specific job here is I do exhaust systems," he said. "So, I bend tubings and pipings. That’s more like an art form for me."

He does not romanticize the labor. Working with metal leaves a mark. The heat, the grinding, the repetition and the force all register in the body. 

His art may carry grace and symbolism, but it begins in strain. It begins in hands that absorb impact and in a body that must stay with the work long enough to make hard material yield. 

"It takes a lot of toll on your hands and your body for sure," he said. "A lot of heat comes out to it. A lot of grinding."

Still, he returns to sculpture for reasons that reach beyond craft. He describes the process as challenge, but also as release. 

The same shop that demands physical effort also offers him a kind of stillness. In that sense, the work becomes more than design or assembly. It becomes a way to empty out what he carries inside.

"It’s a different approach that I take to it," he said. "The meditation through my sculptures. It satisfies me a lot more."

Much of that inner life flows toward Armenian identity and memory. 

One sculpture honors the Armenian Genocide. It does not treat history as something distant or sealed away. It pulls grief and survival into the present through symbols that speak directly to heritage, language and endurance. 

The Armenian alphabet appears in the work. So do forget-me-not flowers. Together they turn sculpture into testimony.

"I want to show people what we have endured with all the pain through one of my sculptures," Khayalian said. "The base is a tree trunk. We have our Armenian alphabet. Our language. It’s dear to us. We’re eternally grateful for our culture and our Armenian people."

That sense of inheritance runs through the entire story. The family business traces back to Syria. The art points toward Armenia. The shop stands in Pasadena, where many diasporic lives have taken root while still looking back toward other homes, other ruptures and other beginnings. 

Khayalian’s work seems to hold those geographies together. It understands that home is not always one place. Sometimes it is a chain of places. Sometimes it is language. Sometimes it is memory.

Sometimes it is the act of making something lasting from fragments that remain.

His wife, Maral, says inspiration also enters through ordinary domestic life, through what the family watches, talks about and absorbs together. Even pop culture can spark a burst of work. 

She recalls the household’s fascination with the Johnny Depp trial, which led Khayalian toward a run of pieces that turned obsession into object, including a large metal Black Pearl ship and a sculpture inspired by the Mad Hatter’s hat. 

"It started with my obsession with the Johnny Depp trial," Maral said. "It was 24-7 in our household." 

She said of the pieces, "They were labors of love for him."

She says life with an artist keeps the house alive with surprise. She also points to more serious events that have pushed him inward and then back toward creation. 

The 2020 war in Armenia, she says, stirred something in him and led him to make more work. Even when the pieces carry whimsy or fantasy, they remain tethered to grief, concern and the pressure of history.

"It’s actually quite exciting in our household to have someone as creative as Tro live with us," Maral said. "Every day is something different." She added, "Closer to the 2020 war in Armenia it just evoked something inside of him to start creating more."

Today, a small room inside the shop serves as a kind of private museum. 

Customers may arrive expecting a repair estimate and end up in a conversation about sculpture, symbolism and process. 

It is a fitting image for the world Khayalian has built. The shop remains a place of labor and livelihood, but it also opens into something more intimate.

"It’s like my little museum," Khayalian said. "Whoever comes and once their car is done, we totally forget about the payments and then we’re talking about my art."

His newest exhibit, "Mind in Flight," opens April 9 at the Glenmark Hotel in Pasadena. 

The collection centers on bird-inspired sculptures and reaches toward freedom, love and the stages of human connection. 

Birds make an apt subject here. They suggest motion, release, migration and return.

For Khayalian, the series traces a human arc, from solitude to partnership to home and family. 

"It’s going to be called ‘Mind in Flight,’ where trying to elevate your thoughts and your mind to be free," he said. "It’s like a life story. We all start off alone, then we find our significant other, and then we build a home. Finally, you fall in love. You become a parent."

In the end, Khayalian describes the impulse behind all of it in plain words. He has something inside that needs release, and sculpture gives it form. 

In this Pasadena shop, that expression arrives in steel and fire, in fragments joined together, in symbols of heritage and echoes of displacement.

"Whatever I have inside of me, I have to let it out," Khayalian said. "The only way I could express is through my art."