About

The ORIGIN of PLASEEBO

While it has been some 4000 years in the mak­ing, if you believe the back­story, PLASEEBO was finally founded in 2004 as a shop ded­i­cated to cre­at­ing unique one of a kind col­lec­table fig­ures and design­ing orig­i­nal fig­ures for Ultra Lim­ited edi­tions. You can read the PLASEEBO back­story here if you wish

What­ever the direc­tion or medium of expres­sion, the drive is to bring to life a per­sonal vision in the form of a new fig­ure, hence the tag line, ” PLASEEBO / its not what you think “. To cre­ate is to push the enve­lope, that is to say, I will not make today what I made yes­ter­day. The goal of the work is not in achieve­ment, but rather in that of ” ever becoming “.

I am a col­lec­tor, and have always been as far as I can recall. I remem­ber, as a young boy, my most prized pos­ses­sion being a small box in which I kept col­or­ful or uniquely shaped stones, but­ter­fly wings, bird’s feet, dried flow­ers, a skull I had carved from wood, a small red plas­tic A-Bomb, and a wave-washed piece of deep blue glass. This first col­lec­tion was a micro cos­mos of my world at that time.

Since that first taste,collecting has taken me on many jour­neys, includ­ing the quest of unique toys. When I was in col­lage, I took out a stu­dent loan that I really did not need and went knock­ing on doors ask­ing folks if they had any old toys the attic they would like to sell. Thus began a col­lec­tion of early amer­i­can cast iron horse drawn fire wag­ons, pre-war wind up ger­man tin litho vehi­cles, and on and on. Later the col­lec­tions included MIP action fig­ures, vin­tage Japan­ese tin robots and space toys and in the 1980’s vin­tage Japan­ese vinyl kaiju.

My expe­ri­ence as a col­lec­tor is my guide to ensur­ing the last­ing qual­ity and value of the fig­ures pro­duced at Plaseebo, by hand sculpt­ing all of our fig­ures in house and hand paint­ing each piece of every edi­tion, by keep­ing the fig­ures very lim­ited, from one of a kind pieces to Ultra Lim­ited edi­tions as small as four or five and reg­u­lar edi­tions rarely exceed­ing fif­teen, and by striv­ing to con­tin­u­ally cre­ate fresh and unique new figures.

Bob Conge

Some thoughts on THE TOY AS ART

I have often thought of toys as small sculp­ture. They are minia­ture inter­pre­ta­tions of things that are unat­tain­able in the “real” world. They enable a child to become Gen­eral Pat­ton direct­ing the Third Army of die cast Dinky tanks through the dirt in his own back yard or allow an adult to time travel back to that moment in the back yard of his mem­ory. This spurring of the imag­i­na­tion is cer­tainly the stuff of Art.

The con­sid­er­a­tion that the sta­tus of a toy may be ele­vated from that of a play­thing to a col­lec­table work of “Art” is not unique to this century.

One can find exam­ples that reach back thou­sands of years across a myr­iad of cul­tures in both muse­ums and pri­vate collections.

Here is an African toy in carved wood that moved long ago from a child’s hand to stand alone on a pedestal in a collection.

A cen­turies old toy from Peru and another from a Native Amer­i­can tribe that now reside in dust free cases.

More recent exam­ples include, a 1950’s bat­tery oper­ated tin robot now val­ued at $1000. and a 1974 vinyl toy to be offered in an auc­tion next week with a top esti­mated value of $2000.

Clearly not all toys pos­sess those elu­sive intrin­sic qual­i­ties that would enable their move to the Museum. The exam­ples above do how­ever have some impor­tant fea­tures in com­mon. One, they are scarce, their lim­ited num­bers insure sup­ply will never meet demand. Two, they are well exe­cuted, the design of each was well suited for its intended use. Three, they are a reflec­tion of the soci­ety they were made for and as such, serve as his­tor­i­cal mark­ers in the evo­lu­tion of civilization.

Ulti­mately, it is not the designer, gallery or museum that will deter­mine what will be ele­vated to be con­sid­ered “ART”, it is only the col­lec­tor en-mass that has this power by virtue of his or her com­mit­ment of purchase.

Bob Conge

How it WORKS

“The most impor­tant cre­ative part of my day is the first 30 min­utes in the morn­ing. Almost all of my ideas for new pieces come to me dur­ing this period upon wak­ing from sleep and I spend the rest of the day work­ing out how I can bring the ideas to life. I have no idea where the ideas come from and I do not force or try to direct the process, I just let it hap­pen as if I am lis­ten­ing to the voice of some­one else. I make very quick short hand sketches and notes, as some morn­ings it is fast and furious.”

It is a form of brain­storm­ing with self in which the prime direc­tive is ” do not edit at this stage ” What ever comes to mind is all of equal value for the moment and I will sep­a­rate the chaff from the wheat later. I am not direct­ing the process, it is more like I am a fun­nel through which the process flows.

This almost explo­sive stage of the process is clearly the most excit­ing and the fur­thest from any­thing that could be con­sid­ered “work”. The work starts with try­ing to bring some­thing of the result­ing vision into worldly form. Much of this work is also enjoy­able, as the form of a given vision con­tin­ues to emerge, change, evolve, and develop through­out the process, albeit at a much slower pace.

Some times the process is sparked by my con­cern for what I see as deplorable human behav­ior such as our war in Iraq, which inspired my WAR fig­ure or my anger over the unfair prac­tices of Banks which resulted in my sculpt­ing the ” Bank Amer­ica ” piece. Other times it may bub­ble up from dis­tant child­hood mem­o­ries or fears.

Each morn­ing sets the stage on which my day will play.

Bob Conge