The Burger King / A fable for America
  copyright Bob Conge 2013

Looking back, it is difficult to grasp Sumner only weighed a bit over 3 pounds at birth and one might wonder if overcompensation played a role in his development as neither his mother or father broke five feet or weighed nighty pounds soaking wet.

It was touch and go at first and Mr and Mrs Forward were overjoyed when they were finally able to bring little Sumner home after spending the first fifteen weeks of life in a glass case at the neonatal unit of Strong Memorial Hospital. Being their only child, they wanted him to grow up big and strong. To that end they just could not feed Sumner enough morning, noon, night, and often in between.

BIG he got, by the age of twelve, at 476 pounds and six foot eleven, he was too big to return to school in the fall. His education over, Sumner got a job flipping burgers at the local McDonalds a few blocks from his house where he slipped himself a burger for every one he cooked. Two hundred or more on a good day. By the following Spring, when Sumner was fired for stealing, he was eight feet ten and weighed 923 pounds.

Hungry all the time, Sumner’s habit of biting his fingernails progressed to nibbling bits of flesh off his fingers till bone would show through here and there. With both of his parents working three jobs each they could not keep up with the grocery bills.

Sumner not only ate his parents out of house and home, when the fridge was finally empty, he ate them as well. And then the mailman and three of his neighbors coming home late at night. In the end he was too large to get out of the house and his finger nibbling eventually escalated, leading his all consuming habit to become his own demise.

The moral ? It would seem Zappa was right so many years ago when he said,  “you are what you eat !”

This is a one of a kind piece based on a new sculpt by Bob Conge. It is a massive  5″ x 6″ x 10″ high hand cast resin figure. It has red glass eye inserts, fabric remnants and an internal motion activated LED unit. It also comes with a hand cast dump accessory.   Signed and dated $1450.

If you would like a chance to purchase “The Burgerking”  send an email to: bob@plaseebo.net   with your name and address by Wednesday April 17th.

The winner will be notified on Thursday April 18th.

Here is the backstory:

                                                                           © Bob Conge 2013

 
Remember all those yellow baby balls of fuzz and feathers taken from their mothers at three days old and offered for sale at Easter from the five and dime or Agway stores ? Quasi parents would offer them to their mauling offspring as cute and cuddly temporal pets to go peeping through the next three weeks or so until the malnourished and exhausted chicks lost their novelty and outgrew their cuteness.

A few were fortunate enough to be dropped off at local farms as orphans to live out life at the bottom of the pecking order. The majority however met a much less desirable end. By mid April the annual country wide genocide was in full swing at the hands of unfeeling nazified mothers and fathers. A flush of the toilet and they were done till next March. Thus annually reenforcing the unspoken lesson for their children, “If you are not cute, you are worthless !”

Well as chicken karma would have it, in 1958 some of the besieged chicks were dumped one night on a dirt road near an abandoned farm in Alamagordo New Mexico. The empty farm sat on the fringe of the Nevada Proving Ground for atmospheric atomic testing and the lost chicks found endless fields of irradiated corn and ponds filled with water that would glow green at night.

Only two years later they were thirty-eight feet tall and were eating everything they could pick apart with their razor sharp beaks. Throwbacks to their dinosaur ancestors, they began attacking cars on lonely night highways and eating the tasty humans inside the metal eggs.

How cute.

Plaseebo is pleased to represented at the 2013 New York Toy Fair February 10 thru13.
The “Mars Attack Misfit Robot” will be on display at the Toy Tokyo Booth #5032

The one of a kind custom “Mars Attack” robot is the third in Plaseebo’s Ultra Limited “MISFITS” series. This is a 9 inch high hand cast resin of Bob’s original sculpt. Hand painted and signed by Conge. The body chamber is filled with a magical mix of slowly moving gel colors and shapes illuminated from the back by a switched color changing LED unit that has replaceable batteries.

You can read “The Misfits” back-story here: http://www.plaseebo.net/news/backstories/the-misfits/

]]> http://www.plaseebo.net/news/2013/02/plaseebo-at-the-n-y-toy-fair/feed/ 0 http://www.plaseebo.net/news/2013/02/plaseebo-named-customizer-of-the-year-by-plastic-and-plush/ http://www.plaseebo.net/news/2013/02/plaseebo-named-customizer-of-the-year-by-plastic-and-plush/#comments Wed, 13 Feb 2013 07:36:01 +0000 admin http://www.plaseebo.net/news/?p=980  

We are pleased and humbled by this award.

http://plasticandplush.com/

Pleaseebo is pleased to have been invited to create a custom for the Kaiju Eyezon 5th Anniversary Show.

Here is the one-off custom “Eyezon Tank” by Bob

With the internal LED unit switched on.

“THE TOY AS ART” would be a befitting phrase to describe the arena my recent work inhabits. These are pieces inspired by the vivid memories of a fervent belief in the likes of Santa and Frankenstein, the tragic loss of that vibrant reality and on occasion my revulsion with the reality of today. My pieces find expression in the form of small sculptural figures in vinyl or resin and large folio limited edition prints.

                                                              “The Misfits”  backstory  © Bob Conge 2012

A familiar face at the Avon flea market every Sunday since the 60’s, Walter would spend the cooler mornings in search of the maimed and abandoned toys of children no longer. He rarely paid more than ten or fifteen cents a piece for the ravaged figures as most were missing limbs or heads. The collection being assembled was not about condition, resale or profit.

These were much more than idols made of plastic and vinyl, for Walter could feel the spirits and hear the distant laughter of the many children who had once worshiped these love-worn toys. To him, these toys were markers in lives unfolding, indelibly printed with the character of those who had played with them so many years ago. Holding each one in his now aging hand, he would listen to its story and wonder what had become of the child later in life.

Walter enjoyed many comfortable evenings with the collection in the old farm house nestled in the rolling hills of upstate New York. He had retired here after a lifetime of inventing and designing useful things for various companies and then spent the next twenty some years assembling the collection that now filled not only all three floors of the house, but his barn as well.

This past winter Walter began working on his Geppetto project. He hoped to design a system to capture the psychic energy he felt being released from the old toys and use it to power the robot toy he was building.

It was now late fall and the the robot body, complete with arms and legs, sat on the work bench awaiting its head and power source. It was one of those unusually warm and sun filled days that are so rare this time of year, perhaps the last one before the snow would again cocoon Walter with his collection for another winter. Drawn by the cunning day, he found himself walking through the Naples yellow fields beyond the barn. Feeling the liability of his eighty plus years, he sat down beneath the comfort of the large and singular Maple in the middle of the fields warmth and fell asleep.

Walter was awakened by the voices of children to find he was covered by what looked like a soft blanket of diamonds glistening in the moonlight. He stood up wondering why he did not feel the cold of this night. The answer came as he looked down to his snow covered body still lying beneath the tree.

Long before this ground became tillable it was the now long forgotten cemetery for the Crowhaven orphanage, who’s stone foundations still shown through the grass here and there at the edge of the woods. The field has been home these many years to those unknown children for whom no one came, save the reaper. Moving like curious cats, the children slowly floated over to Walter wherein he invited them to come to the house to see his toys.

As they entered the house, there on the workbench sat the headless robot with its power source window glowing in an array of changing colors like a miniature aurora borealis. The rest of that winter and many since found Walter building other robot bodies and the children selecting various heads from the collection to sit atop them. Misfits one and all.

This is the first “MISFIT” figure in the series:

“The Night Gamer Misfit Robot”

“The Night Gamer Misfit Robot”

“The Night Gamer Misfit Robot”

“The Night Gamer Misfit Robot” / LED units on in darkened room.

Plaseebo plans to release six of the 9 inch one of a kind Misfit customs over the next 12 months. Each Misfit custom will be based on the new body sculpt in hand cast resin but will have a different head and hand paint.

The body chamber is filled with a magical mix of slowly moving gel colors and shapes illuminated from the back by a switched color changing LED unit that also lights the interior of the head.

And here are some other possible future Misfit customs:

“Mickeybaby Misfit”

“Mr Freeze Misfit”

One of the pieces I am showing is a 1 of 1 hand paint “The Son Of SUM”. Hand cast resin with inset eyes.

Humpty Dumpty Reanimated
© bob conge 2012

We all know how the first half of this story goes: H D was sitting on a wall / had a
great fall / and no one could put him back together again.
Well not until 1801, when a German stone mason named Wilhelm Trowels Point,
came across these strange looking white shell like pieces in the soil at the base
of a wall he was repairing on the grounds of the young Victor Frankenstein.
Victor recognized the pieces immediately as being from the legendary egg like
creature and thus began his first and far less well known foray into reanimation
many years before the Doctors infamous second attempt. In many ways this was
the more successful of his experiments and HD-2 became a most capable lab
assistant to the good Doctor until his death some 52 years later.
HD-2 ran out of power a few weeks later and was sold with contents of the
castle that following spring. Nothing is known of his whereabouts until May of
2005 when I purchased him from an old curio shop in London.
HD-2 has been a valued assistant in the Plaseebo shop these past seven years.

This is a new 11″ one-off custom vinyl mash-up with a vacuum tube, lights and slime.