The Shining Mantis a Brooklyn-based artist duo consisting of Mike Estabrook and Ernest Concepción. The collaboration is based around a series of visual battles in which the two artists draw spontaneous attacks on the other's work. These drawings function as performances as well as site-specific installations, and have taken the form of projections, collages, and, most often as Kangarok, a series of large scale chalk murals.

The Shining Mantis has executed works at Arario Gallery, Ise Foundation, The New York Studio Gallery, Art Dissident Montreal, ArtBreak Gallery, the 2007 LMCC Benefit Gala, and in 2008, were commissioned to do a drawing at Pulse Miami.

Marrying a public monumentality and theatricality with an aesthetic of private, back-of-the-class monstrous doodling, Kangarok, the ongoing battle saga of The Shining Mantis, collapses the whimsical with the grotesque and crude, all with an underlying graveness. Inspired by either the ‘famed’ mistranslation of ‘Ragnarök’ into ‘kangaroo’ by localizers of Japanese video game Tales of Phantasia or the infuriating insistence of Miscrosoft Word’s auto spell-correct function, the term ‘Kangarok’ is thus itself a (linguistic) collision and collapse. In Norse mythology, Ragnarök, the ‘final destiny of the gods,’ refers to a series of events including a great battle and ultimately the submersion of the world in water. In contemporary pop culture, it refers to a tabletop war game.

Though appropriately rooted in a history of serious art by serious artists depicting serious scenes of violence and death, The Shining Mantis’s own war game challenges that same art historical tradition to a duel with a playfulness, ephemerality, and collaborative bent. Drawn in chalk, an artistic tool as powerful as any other, though admittedly more vulnerable to time, the in-battle artistic strikes neither aim for nor result in a simple destruction, but instead for and in a compounded meaning and added layers of beautiful absurdity.