Artist Nathan Sawaya has unveiled his latest Lego creation, a 1.5metre tall ‘working’ (sort of) Lego Blackberry 9360.
Nathan Sawaya was commissioned to build the piece after his Lego iPhone creation last year. It is unknown who commissioned the piece, but it is presumed someone in Blackberry PR paid for the work.
Sawaya writes: “I was commissioned to create a giant Blackberry Tour 9360 smartphone out of LEGO bricks. But there was a catch. It couldn’t be just a static replica, it needed to have a video screen that really worked. Fun.”
“After some trial and error, I embedded a flat screen TV into my brick sculpture to get the effect of having working video in this over-sized brick smartphone.”
Sawaya’s art is currently touring North American museums in a show titled, The Art of the Brick. It’s the only exhibition focusing exclusively on LEGO as an art medium. The creations, constructed from nearly one million pieces, were built from standard bricks beginning as early as 2000.
According to journalist Scott Jones, “Sawaya is a surrealist mash-up of forms and artists. Imagine Frank Lloyd Wright crossed with Ray Harryhausen, or Auguste Rodin crossed with Shigeru Miyamoto, and you start to get a sense of where Sawaya is coming from.”
Apart from a working LCD, the phone isn’t useful for anything much, apart from being able to “totally crush my LEGO iPhone” and as a publicity piece for Blackberry/RIM and his own “the art of the brick museum show” which is touring around America.
