Most of us have played with LEGO® at some point in our lives.
Few have used the common children’s toy as a medium to create art.
Kelly Litzenberger has managed to do just that, the results of those efforts currently being on display at the Godfrey Dean Gallery in the city.
“Yorkton LEGO City brings together an imaginative LEGO cityscape along with LEGO renditions of historical and contemporary Yorkton buildings. City Hall, built as a federal government building in 1954, and the 1912 Hudson Bay Company building are both still in use. Painted Hand Casino (Thalden.Boyd.Emery Architects) is a thriving facility, completed in 2009. The entrance features beautiful bronze statues by Saskatchewan artist Lionel Peyachew. Recreating Yorkton’s Canadian Pacific Railway station in LEGO is part of capturing a vanished landscape,” details the artist statement for the show.
For Litzenberger the recent art work ties back to his childhood.
“I played with LEGO a lot as a kid,” he told Yorkton This Week in an interview at a gallery reception to launch the show July 8, adding like most he played with the common building blocks “until 10, or so.”
Then like most children he abandoned LEGO, only coming back to it about 30-years later when he had a son.
Litzenberger bought his young son a set, or two, and found he was getting “a lot of joy out of LEGO,” helping his son.
It came at a time in the artist’s life he needed a calming activity.
“I was dealing with a lot of stress,” he said, adding he found LEGO was “a good tool to relief a lot of that anxiety.”
Litzenberger suggested the multi-layered process of play involves not only a high degree of imagination; it requires attention to detail, concentration, and patience.
And suddenly Litzenberger found himself hooked on LEGO again.
While he avoided suggesting he was addicted to building with the blocks he did admit to “now running out of room” to store the already built structures, and the tubs of blocks awaiting construction.
“There’s a lot of stuff already built at home,” he said.
The Yorkton show, in particular the five pieces based on Yorkton buildings, again goes back to Litzenberger’s desire to introduce his son to the world of LEGO, and its possibilities.
“As a father of a young son, my current work in LEGO® was inspired in part because I wanted to recreate for him a rendition of the building where I established and ran Revolution Skate and Snow from 1998 to 2004, the first action sports retail store in Yorkton,” he wrote in his artist statement.
The recreation of the skateboard shop which was on the corner of Third Avenue and Broadway Street is one piece Litzenberger said is not for sale. It is for his son to play with, complete with a removable roof which reveals an upstairs apartment, and a main floor store complete with cash register.
Other pieces specifically made for the exhibit he hopes find new homes.
“I think I would have a hard time tearing them apart,” he said, adding he hopes they might sell locally, suggesting the rail station would look good at the Yorkton branch of the Western Development Museum, and that the City might want the City Hall piece.
Each of the pieces had its challenges, none more so than the former Hudson’s Bay building on the corner of Second Avenue and Broadway Street.
“The Hudson’s Bay building was a tricky one. It’s so dear to people if I did something wrong they would immediately recognize it,” said Litzenberger.
The smallest of the pieces City Hall and the Painted Hand Casino have about 2200 pieces each, the rail station some 6300.
While Litzenberger loves working with LEGO as a means to create and to relax, creating custom pieces is not a low cost activity.
“It’s not a cheap escape,” he said, noting certain hard to find pieces purchased in Germany were $3 per brick.
Creating the Yorkton buildings was also time consuming not just in the building, but in the initial design.
“There’s no software you can use where you just scan in a photo and it spits out a plan,” he said.
So it was largely designing from the ground up, planning piece-by-piece.
And then there was finding the right pieces, if LEGO had ever made them, and in the right colour.
Litzenberger explained there is a worldwide fraternity of Adult Fans of LEGO (AFOL), and among those dedicated builders there are some commonly held tenants, one being that you never paint a block to get the right colour, and you never use glue to hold a structure together. In other words you build with what LEGO has produced.
The show is part of a broader national initiative.
Roadside Attractions is a public art project launching summer 2018 from July 1 to Aug. 31, across Saskatchewan. Organized by Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Public Library, and partners across the province, Roadside Attractions presents a network of contemporary art commissions across Saskatchewan during the summer of 2018, explained gallery director and show curator Don Stein in his curator’s statement.
“Each participating artist considers the unique histories, geographies, and populations of their exhibition locations – factors that have shaped dozens of Saskatchewan spaces into meaningful places. Over 20 art works by 21 artists are presented across the province, over a 20 hour drive. The project has received prestigious funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and Tourism Saskatchewan,” he wrote.
Roadside Attractions is one of the 200 exceptional projects funded through the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter initiative. With this $35M initiative, the Council supports the creation and sharing of the arts in communities across Canada.
“The idea of an ‘attraction’ is a situation that draws visitors by providing something of interest or pleasure. Yorkton: LEGO City drew inspiration from the flea circus, a type of attraction with roots in the 1570s, but that became popular in the 1830s in England,” wrote Stein.
“LEGO is all about constructing miniature worlds, populating them with mini figures, and then playing or interacting to animate the built environment. The builders have complete control over the miniature world and its inhabitants.
“Yorkton Colony was a colonial construct during a time of expanding empire: planned communities in western Canada created by the federal government using the mechanisms of colonialism in microcosm to develop and populate Saskatchewan.
“New settlements were business ventures. Colonial companies purchased rights to large tracts of land, with conditions including attracting settlers and establishing viable communities within a few years. Over 100 such ventures were organized, but in the end only 27 met the conditions and prospered.
“The Company functioned as an agent of the Dominion, assigning land and deciding the details of their colony. Most importantly, they had a total monopoly on all the business that was transacted, selling goods, services and land to the citizens.
“The York Farmers’ Colonization Company was established in 1882 by Ontario businessmen. When a Post Office was established in 1883 the name was changed from York City to Yorkton because of the existence of a York City in Ontario. The Company continued to be involved in business until 1947.”
The show will be at the Godfrey Dean Gallery until Aug. 31.
