Skulloctopus From Outer Space

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. 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 Giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") is a neologism for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray". It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints.