Who is Gab Bois?
Gab Bois is the Montreal-based mastermind behind a series of uncanny photographs that bend the line between the real and the imaginary. Using her self-taught digital manipulation skills and post-production, she imagines alternative functions for a variety of everyday household objects. From a tube of toothpaste squeezed into a lightbulb a telephone receiver that doubles as a shower, nothing is out of the reach of Bois’ imagination. Her focus on the ordinary and the overlooked has garnered her a following of more than 400,000 on Instagram, where she playfully transforms the familiar into the entirely unreal.
Why should you follow?
Expect to double-take at more than one of these images, where unnatural pairings force us to look closer at even the things that we thought we knew best. Ever seen a Chanel-branded sanitary towel? How about coffee beans packaged up as paracetamol? With just a few smart visual cues, Bois has much to suggest about the state of our over-medicated, hyper-branded and self-obsessed contemporary reality—not to mention about our short attention spans. When it is all too easy to keep on scrolling, Bois stops you short in your tracks.
What Instagram doesn’t tell you
Bois often features herself in her work, making use of her own body to heighten the contradictory sensations that define much of her imagery. It is an impulse that drives her inclusion of familiar household items and food too, and one that inevitably comes in handy during an unprecedented period of lockdown due to Covid-19. Her photographs capture the creativity that can be found even in the messy surroundings of your own home. Bois reveals how a little boredom can make something beautifully bizarre.
