The Godfrey Dean Art Gallery is doing something fun for the whole family this Christmas season. The newest exhibit at the gallery is a display of Lego creations built by Kelly Litzenberger.
The centerpiece of the display is a Christmas village, complete with a functioning train and motorized reindeer. It’s compiled from five official sets as well as a number of custom pieces such as a snowboard hill. The display is approximately 8,000 pieces all told.
There are also buildings and stores that Litzenberger created, including a recreation of Revolution Skateboards, a business he owned which used to be located at Broadway and 3rd Avenue. The building took 2,200 pieces and took about forty hours to build, and is being voted on to become an official set on the Lego Ideas website. The actual building that the shop was in has since been destroyed, but Litzenberger wanted to bring it back for the sake of his family.
“I have young child now, so I decided to recreate that building out of Lego, both as a challenge and as a play thing and memory for my son to have.”
This is a first for the gallery, and Litzenberger says they want to see what people think of more youth-oriented programming at the gallery, and a display based on Lego is a good way to engage young people with something they recognize and enjoy.
“Lego is the perfect medium for everyone to relate to. We’ve all kind of grown up with it, we’ve all had the experience of having an imagination and building with Lego, so I think it’s the perfect medium.”
This is the first Lego display at the gallery, but it won’t be the last. Litzenberger has been commissioned to build Yorkton’s Lego legacy, re-creating several historic buildings from the city in the building blocks. The challenge is going to be deciding which four buildings are going to be built, and Litzenberger admits everyone has their own favorites and there are plenty of buildings in the city, whether surviving or not, that would make good candidates to be recreated.
“It’s just going through those old history books and hopefully talking to people who knew them when they existed so we can bring up some more stories about them.
The show will have a brief run, only until December 9, so Litzenberger encourages everyone to bring the family to see it before it’s gone.
