Artist Gab Bois’s Vegetable-Shaped Catch Holds More Than Just Some Trinkets

I have always been a collector of things, both useful and not so useful. As a kid, I collected tiny erasers shaped like animals and food, and rocks that looked like other objects. One of my collections now is ceramic dishes shaped like fruits and vegetables, which I started after seeing an exhibition on the history of French cuisine at the Pointe-à-Callière museum in Montreal, where I live. It displayed all these wild ceramics and glassware inspired by food items, like a cake cover that resembled a four-tiered cake. Sometime after that, I was in a thrift store and saw a big dish shaped like an ear of corn, and that became the first piece of my food-shaped ceramic collection.

Whenever I travel now, I go to thrift stores and look for food-shaped ceramics. It’s so exciting when I spot one from far away and I’m like, is that what I think it is? I got this cabbage dish at a Goodwill in Miami when I was attending Art Basel in 2019 and a teapot in the shape of a cauliflower that broke in my suitcase on the way home, even though I triple-wrapped it in socks and sweaters. Most of the collection—I have about thirty pieces—lives on a shelf, but the cabbage, which made it back from Miami unscathed, serves as a trinket holder by my front door.

I love things that are made to look like something else. My artistic practice is interested in the surreal quality of everyday objects, something that makes you do a double take. That "Wait, what?" moment is always what I’m searching for in my work, where I create bizarre tableaux. We’re conditioned to consume the world around us at such a fast pace, and I find a lot of value in moments that make us stop and reflect, the way this cabbage dish did for me. My work is an homage to objects. If it can allow people to have a different outlook on something they’ve seen a million times, then I’ve done the object justice.

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