BUILDING BLOCKS
Toronto artist’s themes are social justice, history, nature. His medium is Lego,
It is a child’s toy in a man’s hands.
Lego. The colourful interlocking blocks that click with young imaginations to create buildings, spaceships, people, animals and whatever else little kids dream up.
Toronto’s Ekow Nimako, 36, was one of those dreamy kids. Now, his long slender fingers transform the sturdy bricks into a spectacular gallery of Lego art: fantastical creatures, West African masks, soaring birds and political statements such as Tar
Baby — a discomfiting sculpture that explores the painful complexities of shadism between a mother and her infant. Next up: the human brain. Nimako is one of 100 international and Canadian artists recruited for the Brain Project, a June fundraising event to support brain research and care at Baycrest hospital. The creations will be displayed at locations around Toronto and include offerings from famous artists, like Mr. Brainwash and Gary Taxali, celebrity designers like Kim Kardashian West and emerging talents like Nimako.
The public art installations will be on display beginning June 3 and include locations such as Nathan Phillips Square, Mel Lastman Square, Union Station, Fort York and St. Lawrence Market. Jordana Novak, director of events for the Baycrest Foundation, said securing Nimako — a full-time artist for just three years — was a coup for the Brain Project because he is a fresh face with a oneof-a-kind style whose reputation is poised to explode.
“People need to start buying his work now because in 10 years, you won’t be able to afford it,” said Novak.
Novak said she “actively pursued” Nimako for the project after his spectacular Nuit Blanche installation — Silent Knight — drew rave reviews across the art community last year. It’s priced at about $100,000, Nimako says, one of his more expensive creations.
Working in bare feet and sometimes for 10-hour stretches, Nimako built Silent Knight — a 50,000-piece Lego barn owl depicted in soundless, predatory flight — often listening to documentaries on barn owls streaming from his laptop in his cosy fifthfloor studio near Dufferin St. and St. Clair Ave. W. He said he sometimes slept beneath the enormous owl, needing a break from days of gluing Lego blocks to form the 225-kilogram bird around a metal base.
It is a painstaking technique that requires patience with the medium — the bricks can be quite tiny — as much as imagination.
“Getting this ear just right might take me a day,” Nimako said, picking up his rendition of a long-tailed white squirrel inspired by those in Trinity Bellwoods Park, and pointing at the tiny Lego ear on the side of the rodent’s head. Nimako said he accepted the Brain Project offer because it’s a departure from birds and beings, his signature themes, to the inner workings of a human skull. It may also bring in a little cash.
Project artists all receive the same honorarium to pay for their supplies, Novak said, adding that artists must cover any gap in costs. She said 50 of the 100 brains will be selected by project curators for an online auction with artists receiving 10 per cent of the “hammer price before all fees are subtracted.”
“Physically, it’s a challenge for me” to create something like the brain, which he’s titled Grey Matters, said Nimako, whose innate sense of engineering negates the need for sketches, computer plans or blueprints — not even for Silent Knight.
“I’ve only created organic matter in this way once before. I built a human heart and it was to scale, (for the cover of a musician friend’s album, not yet released) . . . I enjoyed it quite a bit. It was very, very, very difficult to build because organs and organic matter have this very gelatinous exterior,” he continued.
“It’s one thing to simulate the form of an animal or human but it’s another thing to specifically replicate an organ.” Novak said beyond Nimako’s unique artistic skills, the Baycrest Foundation approached him be- cause of a type of scientific symmetry.
“There is a beautiful connection between what he does, which is a form of engineering, and what we do, which is research.”
“We love working with him,” Novak said of Nimako. “He’s a lovely human being and a very generous man.”
And who wouldn’t love working with someone like this: Nimako begins emails with the salutation “Peace.” The single father of two daughters sometimes texts happy emojis — like pretty flowers — with messages.
He usually buys used Lego parts online from around the planet, enjoying the “kid energy” from the repurposed blocks that go into his art. (That contrasts with dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s Lego-purchasing experience. Ai received an apology from Lego this year, after a bulk order of bricks was initially refused by the toymaker because of the political nature of his work.)
In Nimako’s apartment, which doubles as his studio, he sips homebrewed tea, listening to music playing softly from his laptop. He studied fine arts at York University, intending to pursue creative writing, but was laid off from his first full-time job as a writer/editor for a successful start-up company that dissolved.
After the job loss, he started building miniature birds in June of 2012 as a hobby while looking for work. When employment in writing and as a musician (he plays guitar and drums) didn’t gain enough traction, Nimako recognized his potential to become a full-time Lego artist.
“I guess you could say my ‘aha’ moment was when I realized I had about 30 species of birds by the end of that summer,” Nimako said — those birds became his first Toronto exhibit, called Aviarageddon in 2013.
“It was difficult for me until about late 2014, but I have not worked another full-time job other than my art since 2012.”
Now successful and in demand, the soft-spoken Nimako wonders aloud if a local rapper might like a project he’s designed with him in mind.
“I built a piece that I’m working on getting to Aubrey Graham, otherwise known as Drake,” Nimako said, chuckling.
“He doesn’t know about it, but I was kind of inspired by his OVO insignia. (It features an owl.) . . . It seems that owls have always been part of my progression and my practice so I decided to build something that would reflect OVO.”
Birds are a passion for Nimako, a nature lover. So is social justice.
His social justice themes flow, in part, from a disturbing personal incident more than a decade ago at a relative’s home in Scarborough.
Nimako recalled how Toronto police stormed a baby shower for his second child, handcuffing Nimako and his friends and placing the startled men into the backs of cruisers.
“They were armed to the teeth with dogs and large automatic weapons,” Nimako recalled, describing the police raid.
Nimako said an elderly white couple had erroneously reported to police that the Scarborough home — it was the house of his daughter’s grand-aunt — possibly contained guns after the couple had a “fender bender” with a shower guest.
But there were no guns. There were never any guns.
The police left. The shower was ruined. Police incidents left mark Ekow Nimako is a native of Montreal, one of three sons born to Ghanaian parents. He remembers the overt racism he experienced as a child — the N-word and other cruel taunts hurled at him based solely on his skin colour — as the family travelled from Montreal to England and back to Canada, eventually settling in Scarborough after his parents divorced.
As he got older, Nimako said unwanted hostile contact with police crept into his life.
He said he was never “carded” while walking in Toronto but recalled the time, as a teenager, when he and a buddy were eating hamburgers at a fast food joint when fast-arriving officers mistook Nimako and his friend for a different pair of teens. He said the officers began verbally abusing and threatening them before realizing their error.
“There are a few incidents that stand out far more than the others,” Nimako said, adding that the baby shower memories still pain him.
“Then there are the smaller, subtle micro-aggressions that you deal with on a regular basis. It’s insane. It’s the state of the world in many ways.”
Those experiences have helped to propel Nimako’s sculptures as he dives into themes such as black identity and, for a 2018 exhibition he’s planning, the harsh treatment of migrants around the world. Pariah Girl is in the works; it will be a study of an abused 12-year-old Medusa.
His 2014 Building Black exhibition at the Daniels Spectrum was physically and intellectually challenging, says Nimako. For this gallery, he had to move from building miniature birds to replicating full-scale humans to convey a highly personal theme.
“Building Black is an exploration into the black identity and what that even means, the term black identity, because even that, in itself, is often controversial,” Nimako said.
“Some people don’t like the term black or being called black and having that racial signifier because in many respects, it’s not true; there are many shades of brown.”