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METRO ATLANTANS HEADED to New York before Jan. 5 might want to get a LEGO up on life by taking in some unusual art.

You’ll find it near the razzmatazz of Times Square. Just wend your way into the theater district, avoiding the costumed characters that stroll by — Spider Man, Hello Kitty, Elmo — and head for the Discovery Times Square museum on West 44th Street.

The Discovery museum, found just between the Helen Hayes Theatre and a bowling alley, is showing the Art of the Brick exhibit, an eye-opening look at what a grown man can do with a child’s toy. More accurately, perhaps, it’s what an artist can do with an unexpected medium.

All preconceptions aside, it’s fascinating.

SAWAYA
SAWAYA

Using thousands of the small, colorful plastic blocks, New York-based artist Nathan Sawaya — who does this for a living — has created LEGO versions of major pieces of art ranging from a Lascaux cave painting and the Mona Lisa to Paul Klee’s New Harmony.

If this leaves you unmoved, go see the sculptures.

A full-scale reproduction of an Easter Island Moai figure dominates the next room. Sawaya captures its massive quality; lighting accentuates shadows in the eyes and across the surface. The work recalls the mystery of the original, but creates something unique.

Another monumental face in the exhibit is Sawaya’s own. Rendered in 10,770 red LEGO bricks, Facemask is a warm, genial, human self-portrait. Sawaya is fascinated with the body, and he takes inspiration from the streets of New York. Some LEGO figures are juxtaposed with the street photos that inspired them.

Among his original sculptures — those not replicating other art — the most photographed may be Swimmer. It’s a prone figure with an outstretched arm, created in two shades of blue LEGOs. Only the parts of the body above water are shown, and loose bricks are strewn around the figure, indicating the water’s surface. The use of the scattered bricks is arresting.

In Sawaya’s work, LEGOs capture a sense of the components of things. A viewer can hardly miss the similarity to pixilated images — the ones we see everyday on LED screens made of many dots of colored light.

WHISTLER'S MOTHER
WHISTLER’S MOTHER

Sawaya’s art carries a sense of the digital world. It’s only a step from that to realizing that components rely entirely on our interpretation. When they break down, as when images become pixilated, meaninglessness ensues.

Another of Sawaya’s much-heralded sculptures is called Yellow. It’s a human head and torso in which the chest and abdomen are open, spilling out yellow LEGO guts. Across from it is Hands, a gray torso from which the hands have fallen and disintegrated into a small pile.

This is not just symbolic. Museum guides live in fear that visitors will touch a piece of the art and the LEGOs will fall apart. It’s happened several times.

The Venus of Willendorf’s head was knocked off, but a manager put it back on. The back toes of the enormous Dinosaur Skeleton also fell off after being touched.

Disintegration, repair, play. In this exhibit, they flow together. There’s a joie de vivre about it.

Children, of course, will love this show. They’ll get an art history lesson, too, since the art Sawaya copied is well-described and explained.

One caveat: Some sculptures clearly work better than others. A few smaller ones have a blob-like quality.

At the end of the exhibit you’ll find glass cases with children’s LEGO work, some of it surprising in its creativity.

After seeing Art of the Brick there’s one more logical step. Come home and play with LEGOs. Or trek to the LEGOLAND Discovery Center at Phipps Plaza, where piles and piles of colorful bricks await a human touch.

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 Stell Simonton is an Atlanta freelance writer whose work is found in the Christian Science Monitor, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Atlanta Parent, among other publications. She is a member of the Artist Conference Network.

About Kathy Janich

Kathy Janich is a longtime arts journalist who has been seeing, working in or writing about the performing arts for most of her life. She's a member of the Theatre Communications Group, the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, Americans for the Arts and the National Arts Marketing Project. Full disclosure: She’s also an artistic associate at Synchronicity Theatre.

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