DC Lobbyist

FOE Gallery was founded to showcase art, create connections and share ideas. We partner with artists local to international with a focus on vinyl figures, subculture art and illustration. The beautiful space located in downtown Northampton Massachusetts brings people together for openings, music, video, interviews and presentations. FOE is owned and operated by Nicole and Jim Shea. Stop in! They love to talk art, community and possibilities. We build relationships and share art and ideas. Mixed media tends to refer to a work of visual art that combines various traditionally distinct visual art media. For example, a work on canvas that combines paint, ink, and collage could properly be called a "mixed media" work. When creating a painted or photographed work using mixed media it is important to choose the layers carefully and allow enough drying time between the layers to ensure the final work will have integrity. If many different media are used it is equally important to choose a sturdy foundation upon which the different layers are imposed. Many interesting effects can be achieved by using mixed media. Often, found objects are used in conjunction with traditional artist media, such as paints and graphite, to express a meaning in the everyday life. In this manner, many different elements of art become more flexible than with traditional artist media. I founded PLASEEBO in 2005 as a shop dedicated to creating unique one of a kind collectible figures and designing original figures for Ultra Limited editions. 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. I call the way I build my figures "Frankensculpt", because they are cobbled together from unrelated parts in a sculpting process which breathes a new life into them. I like my figures to be edgy, quirky, punkish, dark, more like Franz Kafka than Walt Disney. Some times the work is inspired 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