Spaceships and Disney princesses are playing with plants this week as a new Lego exhibit opens at the Muttart Conservatory.
The Muttart: Brick by Brick exhibit opened at Edmonton’s Muttart Conservatory June 26. Assembled by the Northern Alberta Lego Users Group (NALUG), the show combines exotic plants with elaborate Lego landscapes portraying fantasy realms, space, and downtown Edmonton in the conservatory’s feature pyramid.
City of Edmonton attractions program manager Sarah Gericke said she came up with the idea for this exhibit back in 2021 while playing with Lego with her family during the COVID-19 pandemic. She reached out to NALUG members who agreed to work on a show.
“This was a huge labour of love,” she said, noting how it took conservatory and NALUG members 11 days to assemble the plants and sculptures needed.
NALUG member and exhibit organizer Michel Magnan said this exhibit has been two years in the making, and follows on a much smaller Lego show at the conservatory back in 2017. About 25 club members contributed to this exhibit, which features spaceships, Jurassic Park (complete with real tropical plants), gingerbread castles, a two-meter tall Enbridge building, and a truck-sized reproduction of the High Level Bridge.
Magnan said Muttart officials also asked him to build a scale model of the conservatory, which is now on permanent display in the conservatory’s hub area. Built at a one-stud-per foot scale, the model involves some 45,000 pieces and portrays even hidden areas of the facility, such as the underground tunnel that leads to a greenhouse across the street. (Look for a black rectangle on one of the edges of the model.)
Disney zone
St. Albert Lego artisan Angelique Roth built the sizable Disney-themed display in the exhibit.
“I’ve been to Disney World, Disney Paris, Disneyland,” she said, and she wanted to continue her Disney journey with this work.
Roth said her display, which covers several tables, features thousands of individual pieces depicting settings from Lego’s various Disney-themed sets.
“My passion is all Disney princesses,” she said, and she’s incorporated everyone from Snow White to Moana into this display.
Roth said she started planning for this exhibit in February. The display features a mix of heavily modified Lego sculptures and minifigures all affixed to a custom-built terrain. Guests might spot Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (the predecessor of Mickey Mouse), Jasmine and Rapunzel cruising on a flying carpet, and the apparently floating balloon house from the movie Up.
“You want to create that story,” Roth explained, so she’s arranged the display’s elements so that each Disney princess has a path to visit the others in their homes.
The centrepiece of the display is the Disney/Cinderella Castle, to which Roth has added a large bridge, many minifigures, and about 1,500 purple flowers.
“The entire lake (around it) is a Mickey head,” she noted — a reference to the many “hidden Mickeys” found throughout Disneyland.
Roth said she hoped this exhibit would encourage guests, especially young girls, to get into Lego as an art form.
“I hope it inspires that creative gene in other people.”
The exhibit runs until Aug. 25. Visit www.edmonton.ca/attractions_events/muttart-conservatory for details.
