Artist Gab Bois Isn’t Afraid to Play With Food—or Turn It Into Furniture
As a child, Gab Bois spent countless hours in her backyard, building moss houses for snails, themed hotels for the neighborhood’s stray cats, and restaurants serving flower salads and dirt cakes. It’s no wonder that similar creative endeavors have defined her adult life thus far. A 25-year-old multidisciplinary artist based in her hometown of Montreal, Bois wants to challenge our preconceived notions about fashion, food, and technology, drawing inspiration from everyday objects like sunglasses and french fries.
Among her most striking pieces are stilettos made from dandelions, a sugar cone packed with dirty snow resembling a scoop of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, and actual mud pies decorated with ruby red petunias. She presents most of her work through photography, a medium which, she explains, has the power to suspend reality. "I like to create something playful and shocking that stops people from scrolling and forces them to really question what it is they are looking at," says Bois, who posts her work on Instagram.
Most recently, she’s been developing a series involving furniture that’s a literal representation of comfort food, from a pasta-dough sofa adorned with ravioli pillows to Mario Bellini’s Camaleonda sectional recreated using brioche buns. Bois attributes her inspiration for these pieces to her father, from whom she learned that playing with food doesn’t have to be wasteful or disrespectful. "He’d create faces and pretty designs with whatever dish I was eating and tell me stories to go along with them," she says. "To me, that made the whole eating experience very special, and almost magical."
Below, find a few morsels from Bois’s latest collection. Just be warned that they might cause cravings.
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