Artist Profile Jared Oswald
Jared Oswald, Pareidolia from Micro-City series (#4), 2025, Digital Rendering of LEGO Sculpture (1,884 LEGO® bricks), 16” x 11.2” x 6.9” (406 mm x 284 mm x 175 mm).
Oswald’s pristine architectural sculpture brilliantly transforms rigid components into a cloudlike vision of fleeting wonder.
Artist Statement
My Micro-City series is an exploration of humanity through architecture, highlighting the best and worst of us through the things we build and what we destroy to build them. I’ve found that a city can act as a perfect lens to view a culture through, and therefore a perfect allegory to tell stories and ignite our emotions. LEGO® bricks are the perfect tool for combining art and architecture in this way. Pareidolia is the fourth installment in my Micro-City series.
Named for the psychological phenomenon that causes us to perceive patterns in natural objects, Pareidolia shows a city made of clouds as sharp as it will ever be, before scattering in the wind. The entire model is made only using LEGO® parts that come in white, making achieving certain shapes in the piece extremely challenging. This model is a parallel piece to the second installment in my Micro-City series, Spill Life. These pieces utilize stark color choices to invoke emotion and capture the fleeting beauty we miss in our busy, everyday lives
Artist Biography
Jared Oswald is an American Visual Artist from Poughkeepsie, New York, who specializes in the use of LEGO® elements to create one-of-a-kind art pieces. He is best known for his work that highlights architecture: recreating and installing detailed, scale-models of notable/historic buildings, using architecture to tell human stories and highlighting emotion and experience through the lens of LEGO® and architecture. Jared strives to bring more attention and recognition to LEGO® as an artistic medium. The goal of each piece he creates is to showcase the artistry, creative application of part usage, and unique techniques that working with LEGO® enables.
In 2022, Jared completed his first on-site art installation, a LEGO® recreation of the Cast Iron Building in Poughkeepsie, NY. That installation is still available for viewing today.
In 2023, Jared began working directly with staff members at West Point Military Academy to install a 1:30 recreation of their Jewish Chapel on-site. That installation will be completed and open for viewing in November, 2025.