There's something just natural about the way two Lego pieces click together. It just feels
right. For that moment those two things are perfect and they're meant for each other. With the
lego you can create art, you can create films, you can create models. You can make something
functional. You can make something that you can wear. Everyone has snapped
together a lego brick at one time or another.
It's such a great feeling to hear that click.
Lego has a.lways been a big part of my life
It's something very tangible. It's less austere than an oil painting or a bronze
sculpture and because of that it connects with people in a way that I think art
is supposed to.
If you look at a computer screen it's just a bunch of colored squares if you
zoom all the way in. And so I thought, well, you could do that with lego bricks.
You can create a mosaic, so I decided that i was going to take this to another
level. I've done portraits of a mother and child together or a father and a child together and they're
so powerful because you can see the bond between a parent and a child. I need to make it
special to you. I need this to reflect what's inside of you and than somehow get that on
to the canvas. I suppose an artist working in any medium has this challenge
but then I only have thirteen colors to do it with. Recently I put together an
exhibit that's touring botanical gardens around the United States that's showing kids
plants, insects, birds in a new way. And I created twenty-seven larger than life
sculptures that use almost half a million lego pieces. It took my team and I five
thousand hours to put all of these sculptures together, some of which are as
huge as an eight-foot tall hummingbird all the way through to a life-size polar
bear. Now you've got kids wandering around botanical gardens that would otherwise never be at a botanical garden
which is also really great. Whether it's the message of what my
particular piece is saying to you or simply the connection that you have
with the piece because of your connection with lego, suddenly you've bonded with this in a
way that you may not have if it was perhaps the same story told in a different medium. That
is really special. It helps bring people out who otherwise might not be looking at art and
then speaking to them in a special way.
Every little thing you can think of, Lego has a means or a way or a shape and a
color to create that, if you so desire. I went to college for film but
I realized there were a lot of limitations to shooting live action film.
So the legos are just a medium for me to get what I want to create across.
I really really love the video game culture and I made a film called
Bricks of War, based on Gears of War. So I made a two minute video basically emulating what
it was like to play Gears of War; the behind the shoulders view,
the cameras zoom in.
So whenever I'm setting up a shot I look at every little aspect of it; the lighting, the camera
movement and I build custom dollies to move the camera. When I saw Call of Duty
Three coming out,
I took their launch trailer
and i said hey, let me try to recreate this. It was a lot of fun because it gave me so
many things to work with. We have a train car rolling in a
subway system and I
had to represent different countries. Right now I've been using
cotton balls to make explosion effects and things.
The little characters, they have pivots, they have joints and you can really get
across not only movement
but motion, too, with the lego. It's almost perfectly made for stop-motion animation.
There are films where I make it up beforehand or there are even sometimes where I
make it up as i go. Every film is different and it'll take anywhere between
six weeks,
sometimes it'll take
three months. Lego
opens up all possibilities. I can literally create anything I want
and I love
everything about it.
people can relate to lego because they have this connection to it, they have it
at home. I think there's something about that.
I really wanted to create sculptures
that hadn't been seen before, you know, almost take the lego element out of it.
There's a sculpture called "My Boy" where it's a figure holding a small child
figure in its arms. When I debuted this sculpture at a museum, a woman started
crying. She was not seeing this as a toy, she was just seeing it as art.
When I get to follow my passion and create art for myself,
it is a lot of art that's about metamorphosis. It's about transition, it's
about liberation.
There's a piece called "Yellow" where this figure is tearing his chest open and lego
bricks are spilling out all over
and people have said, is this about agony? What is this piece about? For
me it's about opening oneself up to the world.
"Red" was a piece I did about transition. You see this figure and it's emerging from
this pile of bricks and is he reaching to the sky
or is he sinking into the brinks?
I actually don't really reveal. I want the viewer to have a role when they're
looking at the art.
I was trying to put my emotion into my work, really create these sculptures that
really had something to say.
The fact that it's made out of lego, it opens the art world up
to this
whole new audience that may never even think about taking a Saturday
and going to an art museum and yet because it's made out of lego,
they're drawn.
There's nothing you can't create with lego toys and so every day is something
new, something different, something fun. How many toys can you really say that you
can say I can create anything.
It just has that broad span of all spectrums. We're really seeing a lego
art movement that's emerging. More and more artists are using lego as a
traditional medium and I think it's amazing.