Arthur Gugick, 1960-2019

Hi all, I know this blog has been dormant for a long time, but I just saw a notice on Facebook that Arthur Gugick died in a car crash a few days ago. Arthur was a father and math teacher and, the reason I'm noting him here, an AFOL. You may remember him primarily for microscale recreations of world architectural landmarks, also amazing mosaics, along with other MOCs that you can see in his Flickr stream. I've featured his work here on multiple occasions as he has made several mosaics based on famous artworks. Indeed his last posted MOC was also a mosaic, an experiment in tiling patterns that to me comes out looking like a quilt, which as a form of folk art has a proper home here in this blog.

Barcode

Kosmas Santosa built Barcode in protest of his nation of Indonesia's rank as the the top nation in the world in deforestation.

Sign of the TImes: Failure of the Fourth Estate

Sign of the TImes: Failure of the Fourth Estate, an original piece by Mike Doyle, 2014

Trace

Currently Ai Weiwei has a large exhibit showing at Alcatraz, in San Francisco. A portion of this show is Trace, a large room full of LEGO mosaics of 175+ current and past prisoners of conscience, from well known examples like Nelson Mandela to much more obscure figures. You can download a pdf guide to the display see it in person, along with other art by Weiwei, at Alcatraz until next April.

Peace Chains

Peace Chains by Riccardo Zangelmi. "Peace Chains is an invitation to 'human being ... there is a chain that runs through all the earth, the chain of humanity and peace, it's up to us to decide to wear it and bind us to our great planet Earth."

Industrialization

Pollution: Industrialization by Kosmas Santosa.

Ekow Nimako - Flower Girl

Ekow Nimako is a Canadian artist using LEGO as his medium. He has a current exhibition in Toronto called Building Black, where the black refers both to his cultural experience as the son of immigrants from Ghana and also the color palette for many of the creations. The signature piece of this exhibit is Flower Girl, which he says represents the lost innocence associated with the slave trade.



He wrote Flower Girl Requiem to accompany this piece, which you can find on his Flickr stream.

They Say Forever innocent,
Free from taint or decay world,
filled with basketball Pretty blooms
Plucked from the earth none too soon.

She love for all her hope and youth,
Her pretty gown, the purest truth
Her basketball and the whites Within,
The blooms of cotton, soft and grim.

The world can never seem so stark,
So bright, so safe, so cold and dark
As When gazed upon through childhood's eyes,
For All which my precious dare not oblige.

Alas, her Will not be strewn aisle,
For she who's ever loved is gone
The child of flowers, and picked Praised
Forever innocent, They Say.

Nathalie Vin

London-based mosaic artist Nathalie Vin has used LEGO in a couple of recent creations - not in the way you might expect, stacking LEGO pieces together to create an image, but instead incorporating LEGO with pieces of ceramic, stained glass, gears, and other pieces to create an overall image. She describes Terra Incognita saying:

Life is 'terra incognita' and so is art - an ever-changing event emerging from endless possibilities. With this piece I created an imaginary world where the laws of nature were different from those from Earth but somehow similar in evolution. 'Terra Incognita' is an attempt to symbolise the origin of an early writing by creating a fragment suggesting both contemporary and ancient representations. Hopefully viewers find themselves in familiar and fantasy dimensions simultaneously. I used ceramic glazed tiles to represent a version of ancient writing and stained glass and lego's, computer parts and gold tiles to represent modernity and advanced technologies which other parallel civilizations might have mastered at one time.

BTW, if you're looking for the LEGO, look closely at the little white boxes that the gears are inside - those are white 1 by x tiles turned upside down. At first I didn't realize the gears were that small, so I didn't realize those pieces were LEGO.




She describes her Multiverse:

What was there when there was nothing? What triggered this burst of Cosmic egg, rippling and expanding wave after waves to create our Universe... our Multiverse? To illustrate this concept of " other dimensions" or "Multiverse theory", I chose to superimpose two distinct ideas; The origin of the 'Concept of Time' - starting with the central Point Zero, and 'the Now' - symbolised by our/a 'Computer Era' in the foreground. Although inspired by scientific orthodoxy/ theories, Multiverse is an imaginative realm representing the fusion of two separate dimensions in which the 3rd dimension - evolution - has been erased. I used smaltis, glow-in-the-dark and gold tiles to represent the expanding rich matter of the Big Bang; clockwork parts, lego's, polymer clay moulding and computer parts, were used to represent the Present.

Think Creative

Ricardo Zangelmi built Think Creative.

Enter the Brick

German builder Cole Blaq mixes LEGO with an urban art sensibility. His Enter the Brick series of over 40 works deconstruct the basic 2x4 LEGO brick in surprising ways. Here are just a few selections.

Special Ingrient


Psycho Active


Amp it up!


Modern Brickfare


Growth Factor


∞

Malaysian street art

I definitely need to devote some space on this blog to street art. In this form, sometimes called guerrilla art, graffiti, posters, or other pieces are put up in public places, usually without permission, often with a political or social message. One of the most famous proponents is the British artist Banksy. I've seen both numerous examples of street art using LEGO imagery, and also LEGO renditions of street art. Recently a public piece by Ernest Zacharevic, who hails from Lithuania but is now a permanent resident of Malaysia, has made the news. The piece references the nearby Legoland theme park, and also the high crime rate in the state capital. In sadly predictable fashion, local authorities placed the blame on Zacharevic, saying the image of a minifig about to be mugged would instill fear in visitors to the city, rather than doing something about the actual crime rate. After sparking discussion for a few days, the piece was soon painted over by city authorities. Now copycat images are appearing on walls in various parts of Malaysia.

Yellow

Nathan Sawaya's signature piece is probably his work Yellow. In his description he writes:

Probably my best-known piece. Yellow always draws a lot of attention on the gallery floor, from adults as well as children. Why? I think we grown-ups appreciate how cathartic 'opening oneself up to the world' can be for our souls. And the kids? Probably because yellow guts spilling onto the floor looks cool. For me, this piece is about the metamorphosis I have been through on my journeys.

Dispatchwork

German artist Jan Vormann started by fitting some LEGO bricks into a cracked wall while at an art festival in Bocchignano, Italy, and a movement was born. According to his manifesto ...

... Dispatchwork aims to seal fissures in broken walls worldwide, completing the material compilation in urban constructing and adding color to the urban greyscales, by inserting a very basic construction-material:Plastic Construction Bricks (PCBs)...
... Dispatchwork does not defy deterioration. Rather, it aims to emphasize transitoriness as a chance for the construction and reconstruction of our environments. Adapting to various cities, the project infiltrates walls of cultural heritage, historic facades, fortifications and yet many more less spectacular corners as a colorful repair of shabby walls within our shared spaces.
Dispatchwork contradicts and satirizes the superimposed seriosity of constructions in the cityscape. ... The project also aims to put the focus on the playful, hands-on aspects of creation in our daily lives, and further, on the possibilities for participation to construe and design our own reality.

In a very public and collaborative art project, Jan has traveled the world filling in gaps and cracks with LEGO bricks, often rebuilding crumbled sections of walls and buildings. In many places he has been invited by museums to organize workshops where he takes teams of kids of all ages out to bring color to their city. And he's inspired others. You can organize your own urban Legoization project. Check out his forum to meet up with others to gather in your city, with projects found on six different continents. Here are just four examples, from Tel Aviv, New York City, Berlin, and the Great Wall of China.

Lantern Festival in Nantou

I'm not sure whether to label Luis' Lantern Festival in Nantou as an original artwork or a LEGO rendition of something else. It's based on the logo of the annual Taiwan festival, but IMO it transcends the original to become something quite special. BTW, if you want to learn more about the Lantern Festival, check out my other blog GodBricks.

Power of Freedom: Iraq

I don't just want to feature LEGO renditions of other art here. For the first piece of original LEGO art, let's go to one with a very different take than the previous post, Mike Doyle's Power of Freedom: Iraq.