Chen Chen and Kai Williams hover somewhere between art and design. Their “Shank” series, though, places them squarely over both. The pair work as a design team creating items as diverse as art objects and sculptures to bracelets and furniture. For this series the design studio created a set of thirty shanks – hand made weapons fashioned from everyday objects. The items seem authentic, even used, as if picked up off the floor after a prison riot. While the items may carry unsavory violent overtones, they do underscore a strange sort of innovation born out of desperate circumstances. The shanks serve as a comment and window into extreme “design” and prison culture.
