
Lego Art
Special | 5m 45sVideo has Closed Captions
OFF BOOK examines the growing popularity of LEGO blocks as an art form.
LEGO blocks are one of the most beloved toys in the world, playing a role in many a person's childhood. But for some creators, LEGO has evolved from toy to art form. In this episode, we talk to three LEGO artists who have made beautiful mosaics, amazing stop-motion videos, thoughtful sculptures, and have turned these tiny building blocks into a true artistic medium.

Lego Art
Special | 5m 45sVideo has Closed Captions
LEGO blocks are one of the most beloved toys in the world, playing a role in many a person's childhood. But for some creators, LEGO has evolved from toy to art form. In this episode, we talk to three LEGO artists who have made beautiful mosaics, amazing stop-motion videos, thoughtful sculptures, and have turned these tiny building blocks into a true artistic medium.
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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 just hear that click.
LEGO has always 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 a child together or a father and a child together.
They're so powerful because you can see the bond between parent and child.
I need to make it special to you.
I need this to reflect what's inside of you and then somehow get that onto the canvas.
I suppose an artist working in any medium has this challenge, but then I have 13 colors to do it with.
Recently I put together an exhibit that's now touring botanical gardens around the United States that's showing kids plants, insects, birds in a new way.
And I created 27 larger-than-life sculptures that use almost half a million LEGO pieces.
It took my team and I 5,000 hours to put all these sculptures together, some of which are as huge as an eight-foot-tall hummingbird all the way through to a life-sized polar bear.
Now you've got kids wandering around botanical gardens that would otherwise never be in a botanical garden, which is also a really great thing.
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 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-shoulder view, the camera 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 3 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.
You 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 effect and things.
And 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 some times where I make it up as I go.
So 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, 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 bricks?
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.
[music playing] [SINGING TO TUNE OF STARSHIP, "WE BUILT THIS CITY"] We built this city with LEGO blocks.
We built this city.
We built this city with LEGO blocks.
We built this city.
We built this city with LEGO.
Built this city.
We built this city with LEGO blocks.