Shape-Shifter

Artist Chris Schanck’s idiosyncratic furnishings, wrapped in foil and encased in resin, go on view at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design.

By Stephen Wallis

Photography by Corine Vermeulen

Spring 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/artist-chris-schanck-interview-11643894890

“Terrifying” is how Chris Schanck sums up a sculptural bench nearing completion in his studio on the east side of Detroit. “I drew it and thought, Wait, how?”

Schanck, 46, whose handcrafted creations fall into a hard-to-define category where art and design collide, is producing the bench as a centerpiece of his first full-scale solo museum exhibition, opening at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) on February 12. As with everything he makes, it was born out of his imaginative drawings, but it represents a notable shift toward figurative works that are explicitly narrative—and intensely personal.

The bench’s high-back circular seat, ornamented with cascades of serpentine swirls, is made with a welded steel frame and sculpted blocks of foam, all covered in layers of resin and shimmering foil, a process Schanck developed while studying at the nearby Cranbrook Academy of Art. Crowning the piece are two seated figures facing each other, a skull at their feet. It’s an interpretation of the classic Death and the Maiden motif, and both figures are modeled on Schanck himself. Their hands hold a head whose translucent resin face, rendered in the manner of a Renaissance grotesque mask, will emit a Gatorade-green glow, thanks to a light inside.

Schanck says the idea for the bench emerged dur- ing the Covid pandemic, when he found inspiration in the memento mori, including Death and the Maiden motifs, that proliferated in European art after the Black Death plague. “They were a reminder to live your life more fully—not to fear death but to seize the day,” says Schanck, who is also creating a mirror for the MAD exhibition with relief-carved figures inspired by Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mirror,” a meditation on aging and the end of life. While such allusions might suggest intense self-reflection, he hopes these pieces project a positive, even optimistic spirit.

It’s the sort of balancing act that characterizes all of Schanck’s work, which bridges the industrial and luxurious, the crude and refined, the kitschy and cool. His breakout pieces were his tables, chairs and cabinets made with foam carved to resemble crumbling, encrusted stone or decaying wood. Schanck added the alchemic step of embellishing their surfaces with aluminum foil, at first using ordinary kitchen foil and later shifting to colorful candy-wrapping varieties. Everything then gets sealed in layers of glossy resin.

Dubbed “Alufoil,” the series has found an enthusiastic reception, notably in the world of fashion. Designer William Sofield furnished the Tom Ford flagship on Madison Avenue with a console and chair, while architect Peter Marino commissioned Schanck to create benches for more than a dozen Dior boutiques world-wide. More recently, Bottega Veneta installed several of Schanck’s pieces at its Detroit pop-up shop.

Schanck’s creations are as appealing to luxury brands looking to distinguish themselves as they are to bespoke-minded collectors. Prices typically start around $30,000 and run to $150,000 for original pieces from Friedman Benda, his New York dealer. (He recently signed on with the David Gill Gallery in London, where he’ll have a show early next year.)

“It’s work that appeals to adventurous collectors,” says interior designer Michael Lewis, who often commissions pieces from Schanck for clients. “He has an enormously intellectual approach, and he’s always pushing the boundary to achieve something new.”

Like other artist-designers whose offbeat forms and material choices challenge orthodoxies of good taste—Misha Kahn, Katie Stout and the Haas Brothers come to mind—Schanck makes work that is far from function first. “The typologies are really vessels for [Chris’s] ideas,” says Andrew Blauvelt, director of the Cranbrook Art Museum and curator of the MAD exhibition. “His work is a mashup. A little bit fantasy, a little bit sci-fi. There are literary and classical references. And there’s often a biographical element, deep-seated touch points into his past.”

Those touch points include memories from Schanck’s childhood, first in Pittsburgh and later in Dallas, as well as the Detroit neighborhood where he has lived and worked since graduating from Cranbrook in 2011. Nicknamed Banglatown, the area is home to large numbers of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. Two immigrant women serve as his full-time foil specialists, part of Schanck’s diverse group of studio assistants. “They’re the closest thing I have to a family here,” Schanck says of his team.

Wanting to insert more of his surroundings into his work, Schanck began incorporating discarded scraps, sticks and other detritus from the neighborhood into seemingly jerry-rigged assemblages that convey both a postapocalyptic dystopia and a sense of renewal. His Banglatown cabinet, part of the MAD show, includes a rendition of the inventive homemade scarecrows commonly found in local backyard gardens. “I wanted to tell the world about the ingenuity going on here,” says Schanck, adding that “it could have been a bad idea, but I thought it was worth the risk to try.”

Schanck is taking other chances, too. He’s making his first foray into commercial products with a series of home goods like resin place mats and coasters for Von Gern Home, the tabletop accessories company founded by his friend and client Kira Faiman. And he is partnering with his friend Wesley Taylor, a Detroit graphic designer and artist, to start a fashion and accessories line called Off-World. “As far as I know, I only have one shot at this,” says Schanck. “So why hold back?”