Day: May 26, 2017

The Art of the Lego @OMSI

Free passes for this exhibit were available and so Matt and I spent a sunny Friday afternoon taking in the Art of the Brick.

Before we got started, we found out how tall we were in LEGO bricks.

Matt nearly reaches Albert Einstein’s 184 bricks.

I am a less-impressive 153 bricks.

Note that I am MUCH taller than a Minifig.

All of the LEGO art we are going to see was created by Nathan Sawaya, a former corporate lawyer who now is a full-time artist.  The first  part of the exhibit was Sawaya’s recreations of famous art works, in LEGO.  I liked this, because most of them were in a 1:1 scale, which let me get a sense of size that the internet does not allow.

This was my favorite creation, which is not a 1:1, but rather 1:6 scale.  I liked how they had it hanging so that you could see the light shining through the window.

Favorite part of this?  The use of minifigs.

The next portion of the exhibit was Sawaya’s original art.  You can see how he fashioned even the frames out of LEGOs.

I found much of Sawaya’s original creations, especially when paired with the artist statement of each piece, to be art that it would seem like a motivational speaker would create.  Matt pointed out that Sawaya is a motivational speaker.

I liked better this reproduction of a T-Rex.

Matt has a chat.

The third part of the exhibit had a mashup of photography that included LEGO figures, such as the tree in this photo.

You could see the tree in person.

I also enjoyed our PDX carpet corner of the exhibit.  Sawaya was raised in the area.

One of the last items were these hugging figures, which Sawaya leaves in parks in different cities.

Things that were missing from this exhibit?  Process.  How does Sawaya create his art?  Sketches? Computer modeling? Trial and error? Does he purchase his LEGOs, or are they supplied by the company?  Since the exhibits dates overlap, does he have multiples of each thing, or does each city get their own special items?  Does he have assistants?  How long does it take him to make things?  So many questions!

Dance recital 2017

The difficulty of balancing the baby and the phone-as-recording device:

Recital #3 happened.  The intermediate tap class of the Peninsula Park Community Center danced to “Time to Blow” which is an instrumental piece from That Thing You Do soundtrack.  I love the song and our dance fit perfectly with the music.

This dance recital suffered from my most hated thing: poor planning.  If you could open up that program to read it, you would not find a list of the numbers being performed in the proper order, you would find a hand-written list of every class and participant in the Peninsula Park Community Center’s dance program.

Was the order of performance going to be the same as the class listings?  Who knew?  Things grew more complicated when they begin calling people by number, and not by song title or class name.  “Number one, please go to the stage, number two, please meet to the left of the stage.”  What number were we?  If we were going in program order, that made us number 11.  But were we going in program order?

This isn’t my first time at this particular ranch, and I don’t understand why this dance recital was set up in this fashion when the previous two have followed the normal order of things.  I don’t understand why the program didn’t list the titles of the songs in order.  I don’t understand why they were calling people by number only, not song or class title.

It turned out we were number five, which we discovered when the woman said, “Number five is ‘Time to Blow'” Is there no one in the audience who is dancing to this number?

We were not ready.  We did not have our shoes on.  We did not know we were going.  Apparently, when people “checked in” (something that has not happened the previous two years) the woman wrote a number on people’s program.  But no one “checked me in” when I, or anyone else in the class, grabbed a program, so how were we to know?

I dislike participating in activities that I could have organized better.

Once we got on stage, it was a fine performance to a good song.

I’m hoping for better organization next year.