A collection of new artworks has been added to this set of The Art of the Brick: in the beautiful gallery In Pieces you will see works resulting from an extraordinary multimedia collaboration between Nathan Sawaya and the award-winning Australian photographer Dean West.
Sawaya is best-known for his preeminent and iconic work out of LEGO, while Australian photographer West specializes in hyper realism imagery. The two artists spent years traveling and working together to blend their crafts resulting in the IN PIECES collection of visually stunning two-dimensional images that are exhibited with corresponding and complimentary three-dimensional LEGO sculptures.
“I’m excited to debut a new form of LEGO art and to continue to take this childhood toy into a new frontier of sophisticated contemporary art,” said Sawaya. “LEGO is no longer just for building cars and trucks, it’s a legitimate art medium and I’m proud to have been on the forefront of what is evolving into a bit of an art revolution for the toy.”
IN PIECES features a series of large-scale tableau compositions based on ideas about nature, culture, society and more specifically, identity.
“Identity as a cultural creation has been heavily commercialized and manipulated,” said West. “We wanted to prominently portray this by mashing up our artistic styles and mediums into a highly stylized representation of contemporary life. The integration of Nathan’s unique sculptures adds an innovative and compelling element to the narrative and aesthetic of the collection.”
West and Sawaya collaborated on every element of these pieces of artwork. The duo traveled to various locales in California, Toronto, New York, Utah and Nevada to photograph the scenes for these stories. Sawaya built the featured sculptures piece by piece, trying to capture the illusion that the LEGO sculptures are native to the setting.