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.

Intro­duc­ing a new sculpt by Bob Conge and Ultra Lim­ited series of cus­toms from Plaseebo, “The Misfits”.

                                                              “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:

 

 

 

 

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:

 

 

 

 

I am pleased to have been invited to show some cus­tom pieces in “THE TOY AS ART” group exhi­bi­tion at the Jarvis Rock­well Gallery, 49 Main St. in North Adams Mass. The show opens Thurs­day July 26th and runs through August 26th.        http://downstreetart.org/

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.