Someone’s Doing the Robot

Last June, on one of the Chron’s 73 blogs, a video showed smitten artists Kelly Tunstall and Ferris Plock in their shared studio, and Plock said, “I fell in love with her [adorable pause] work before I fell in love with Kelly Tunstall.” Awww! Anyway. Plock, known for his vast stable of monsters and creatures and things that slither up from our sewers, has lately been sharing canvases with Tunstall, scooting his happy horrors up to her elegant ladies, Beauty and the Beast style. This month, however, he heads out on his own again, and he’s dreamt up a new kind of monster: the killer robot. For Plock, the jump from surreal monster to killer robot is about as great as you might think -- Plock easily covers the distance by using more straight lines and applying high-tech thingamabobs and metallic doohickeys. His solo exhibit “Slay the Giant” features a Hollywood narrative of sorts, with a robot terrorizing a city and a man terrorizing the robot, but his new creation is not completely inhuman -- the sharp teeth imply some sort of digestive process.
Aug. 8-Oct. 8, 2008