Chris Schanck is a Detroit-based American artist and designer.
Ever since he was a student at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Chris has been experimenting with the material after material, to create his own “design dictionary”, unique and unparalleled. The artist is best known for his “alufoil” series in which he packs foam and tin foil, then sealing them with resin, resulting in a transformation of once disrupted objects’ lives into a new breath of existence. In his procedure, Chris Schanck embraces controversies and contradictions. He takes from industrial practices whilst ennobling handcraft, Schanck’s artworks are the product of both assemblage and dilapidation as they do investigate individuality and collectivism at the same time. Schanck’s artworks are never commercial, they do not respond to mass-produced objects prototypes; they rather enhance the exclusive transforming of everyday life objects into unconventional interior design items of uncommon luxury.
He takes industrial and discarded material and revives them by sculpting unprecedented forms, which are often, a figurative reinterpretation of well-known themes. Indeed, his mixtures of sculpture and furniture, blend biomorphic forms with elaborately crafted symbolism. His practice always recalls the artist’s idea to cross the line between art and design in an interactive and multidisciplinary way. Besides foil, Schanck’s performance relates to aluminum, linked to a rooted family tradition of working with such a material. The artist asserts that to do so, he insidiously seeks a means to get outside of his himself and look at the world through other people’s perspectives. Schanck wants his works to exist in the space independently and untouched challenging, by all means, the ordinary.
