This article was taken from the July 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
When gallery-goers stop in front of photographs from Nathan Sawaya and Dean West's In Pieces series, they often fail to spot a secret hidden in plain sight. Take the Edward Hopper-esque image above, Bus, shot on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. It looks like a naturalistic street scene. But look closer, and you'll see the dog is made out of Lego. Oh, and the mannequin in the left-hand window? Lego, too. In fact every one of the compositions involves at least one Lego component: Sawaya handles the bricks, West the camera.
The germ of the project formed in 2009 when West chanced upon Sawaya's whimsical Lego sculpture of a man tearing his torso open. "So I ordered $500 (£330) of grey Lego bricks," says West, a 30-year-old Australian now living in Canada. "But although I had brothers who played with Lego, I never did, and I realised I was so out of my depth. When the bricks arrived I just stared at the box." He contacted Sawaya, who was 35 at the time and living in New York, and the pair began scouting for locations, which West would photograph to use as a background. Later, they would storyboard the final set-up so Sawaya could plan the relevant sculptures on "brick paper". Then the sculpture and requisite models would be photographed independently in a studio against white, and slipped on to the background in post-production. The dog used here comprises some 9,500 bricks; Sawaya says that he easily gets through a million Lego blocks a year.
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The artists say that In Pieces, currently showing at the Vered Contemporary gallery in East Hampton, New York, is more than just trompe l'oeil. The sculptures, especially in their echoes of pixelated computer imagery, emphasise that culture is a construct, not just socially, but literally: image manipulation is pervasive and hard to detect.
The duo's next collaboration will involve a darker, more urban environment. "The people stand in familiar places from the American landscape," says <span class="s2">West. "But they are lost."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
