Bringing LEGO into the art gallery isn’t a new concept. However, New York-based artist and sculptor Nathan Sawaya executes it with such precision and imagination that his work stands apart—especially through his collaboration with award-winning Australian photographer Dean West. Together, the duo has created a hyper-realistic series that explores themes of society, culture, nature, and—above all—identity.

Identity, in the hands of Sawaya and West, becomes a stylized construct. Their work portrays contemporary life as a cultural fabrication, profoundly manipulated and commercialized. Sawaya’s meticulously crafted LEGO sculptures serve as key narrative elements within West’s polished photographic compositions, inviting viewers to question what they see and what lies beneath society’s surface.

The two artists worked side by side on every detail of this multi-layered project—a collaborative journey that spanned several years and countless miles across North America, including locations in California, Nevada, New York, Toronto, and Utah. Each image was carefully storyboarded, with Sawaya building the LEGO sculptures piece by piece to seamlessly integrate into West’s hyper-realistic scenes. The result is a series of visually striking compositions that recall the nostalgic aesthetic of American postcards, with pastel shades of warm yellows and soft blues enhancing the sense of timeless familiarity.

Upon closer inspection, however, the sense of familiarity gives way to something more unsettling. West’s photographs capture solitary figures in stark, minimalist environments, where a quiet sense of abandonment and disorientation lingers. These lonely individuals, depicted in moments of introspection, seem to grapple with the cultural imprints society has etched upon their identities. As viewers engage with the work more deeply, they begin to notice the pixelated surfaces of the LEGO sculptures—a subtle nod to the pixelation inherent in digital photography and, metaphorically, the fragmented nature of identity in the digital age.

The fusion of two-dimensional photography and three-dimensional sculpture in In Pieces creates a unique artistic dialogue between the tangible and the abstract. West’s hyper-realistic photographs and Sawaya’s handcrafted LEGO figures complement each other perfectly, blurring the boundaries between what is real, what is fabricated, and what exists in the liminal space between.