Gab Bois : Décontextualiser la vie par l'art

Who is Gab Bois? Are you and your ‘Instagram’ persona one in the same?

To keep it short, I’m 23 years old, born and based in Montreal, Canada and my creative practice mainly revolves around photography, sculptural installation and design.

I find that I don’t have that much of an online persona as I would like to think, my followers don’t know much about me. Because my work is blurring the line between what’s real and what isn’t, it’s good to keep some mystery in regards to the person behind that work (me), or else some of the magic could get lost.

What do you find is key to your creative process? Do you follow a certain organized ’protocol’, or do you find a degree of chaos is the best inspiration?

Discipline and organization. There’s not much room for chaos in my process apart from brainstorming sessions, where chaos is most welcomed. I used to be very detail-oriented and organized when it came to commission work, but I’ve managed to translate this work ethic and discipline to my personal work as well and it’s had a huge positive impact on the overall look of my work and efficiency to illustrate ideas. I would say alone time and having a proactive mindset are both key elements to my process.

Your works of art take everyday objects, decontextualizing them to give them new uses, lives, stories and purposes. Would you say your mind has always worked this way? Are you constantly searching to uncover new meanings? 

I think so. Maybe not in the literal sense, but I’ve always been very curious and crafty. My parent’s backyard was my playground growing up and I loved experimenting and putting things together. Some of my projects included making flower petal rugs, race tracks for snails and hotels for the neighbourhood cats. It’s always been about telling stories, and growing up I would tell them to myself, but with social media I get to share them with others.

Playing with food is generally frowned upon, but a lot of your work is food focused…and takes playing with your food to a whole other level! Is this something you did growing up? Were you encouraged to do so?

The problem is that playing with food is usually associated with waste, which it can be, but in my experience that hasn’t been the case. I would get very distracted as a kid, and meal times weren’t my favourites, I remember my dad (who’s a very skilled painter and sculptor) would cut my cheese into animal shapes. I would ask him for an animal, and I had to finish whatever was on my plate before I was allowed to eat some cat-shaped cheese for example. Having stories being told to me with the food I ate always made it extra enjoyable and encouraged me to eat the food I was being picky about. I’ve always been taught to finish what’s on my plate and not to take food for granted, I just think there’s a way to be playful without being wasteful. A great example would be saying « here comes the airplane »  to get a baby to eat their food.

Fashion is another recurrent theme in your work, giving it a new life outside its normal sphere of runways, retail, street style or finely-tuned ads via food, orthodontics, inhalers, medication, flowers…the list goes on. What is your favorite aspect in creating these specific types of pieces, whether that be reinterpreting logos, creating a product from scratch or adding new elements to it? 

Just like food, fashion follows specific trends, and that’s something I love to play with. I like to look at trends as a spectator first, just to identify them. I like for some of my work to be at the intersection between food and fashion, sometimes getting mixed, overlapping, each following their own set of trends. I used to love working with logos Malas e Tote Bags, but I recently had to get back into it for a specific project and fell back in love with it right away, so I’d say these days I’ve been really enjoying logo play.

You typically use yourself as a model in all your work. Was that something you had to get used to, or were you always comfortable using your body as a canvas to showcase and express your art?

It was always the most comfortable option to work on my own, mainly because I’m alone most of the time, but also because I know exactly how I want things to look. There are always details of an idea that get lost in translation when putting it into words. By working by myself, I’m allowing the result to be as close as possible to what I envisioned. Also, a big part of that choice is the discomfort and borderline pain that can occur in the shooting process, which is something I wouldn’t be comfortable imposing on anyone but myself.

You created various original pieces for Reebok’s Classic Leather Legacy, ‘Write Your Legacy’ project. Now, we know you love to leave interpretation in the eye of the beholder, but if you had to describe each of them, what would you say? 

Duality, personality and light. The associations are to be determined by the viewer.

And last, but not least, what will Gab Bois’ legacy be?

It’s too soon to say.

Gab Bois’ art is a bona fide lesson in opening our eyes and minds to the infinite possibilities of the objects around us, highlighting the unique talent of this young artist and her ability to transform the ordinary into something extraordinary.