To create these vaguely unsettling images, sculptor Nathan Sawaya and photographer Dean West augment staged but otherwise realistic scenes with an extra shot of artifice in the form of hyperrealistic LEGO sculptures. In the image above, it’s the cute little dog and the mannequin in the window.
Each photo presents an archetypically American scene–the trenchcoated businessman standing in the rain, the red-dressed woman out at the theater, the lonesome desert motel–and the LEGOs seem to call attention to the inherent falsity of these images. According to designboom, the brick-by-brick nature of each sculpture’s construction also calls out the piecemeal nature of digital photography, which builds pictures bit-by-bit, pixel-by pixel.
“In Pieces,” Dean West and Nathan Sawaya, February 28- April 17, Avant Gallery, Soho