The year is 2130. Planet Earth is deserted.
Humankind, having mistreated the natural environment for centuries, has left to seek a new home beyond the stars.
Amid the debris - the piles of abandoned objects and decaying ruins left behind - a scattered population of LEGO miniature figures has emerged to inherit the planet.
Building on the famously precise and elaborately adaptive manufacturing methods of their Danish creators, each community in this civilisation of miniatures has adapted their chosen home - an old Volkswagen car, a jukebox, a jet ski - into a complete world.
Welcome to Relics: A New World Rises, the brainchild of Perth mates Jackson Harvey and Alex Towler, whose childhood love of LEGO led them to the Channel Nine competition show LEGO Masters, which they won in 2020.
From a refrigerator that has become a cryogenic wellness resort to a grandfather clock that is now a time machine, the exhibition features 15 large-scale installations.
It's billed as "the love child" of an antique shop, The LEGO® Movie and Blade Runner.
Here's how Jackson and Alex describe it:
Jackson Harvey: Relics was born out of a desire to create something really unique using our love of LEGO and our storytelling abilities. Blending minifigures with real-world objects allows us to bridge the gap between the world and stories of plastic minifigs and the world of humans and their objects.
It is an exploration of nostalgia - bringing our focus to forgotten objects that, as a society, we have left behind. Some are retro objects that are no longer in use, and some are technologies that are already on the brink of extinction.
Relics is for the curious, the playful, essentially anyone with an imagination. It has been designed to reward people who come with a sense of curiosity and a desire to explore. We built this exhibition for everybody; there are colourful LEGO characters and stories that will hold appeal for children, but there are also considered explorations of nostalgia that will really appeal to an older demographic.
The exhibition explores a real sense of playfulness and fun through storytelling. The LEGO minifigures are the plastic puppets of our stories, and we've had so much fun constructing hundreds of narratives with them. We hope people are able to enjoy these stories, and create some of their own.
We want people to leave feeling inspired to create their own stories. We have been inspired by everyday objects and hope this allows others to look to the everyday for sources of creativity.
We hope people come away with an increased awareness that although the world we've imagined is fun and playful for the minifigures, it is also a bit of a grim one for humans, and this is the world we could be facing if we don't address some of the global issues facing us today.
Alex Towler: Jackson and I have collected some really cool forgotten objects that society has outgrown and have built LEGO communities into them. It is a bizarre contrast between that really derelict, run-down, dystopian future aesthetic and the colourful and bright LEGO. Squishing those two vibes together gives you something that is really weird and kind of wonderful.
This exhibition is for everyone, old and young. Kids will get excited by the intricate LEGO, but it has really been created with adults in mind - the objects themselves are full of nostalgia and the stories we're telling have a lot of references that only adults will understand.
This is a completely new creative endeavour for us ... it's been incredible to see what we can create when we have a team, a warehouse, and a tonne of LEGO. This concept has really inspired a new way of looking at the world for me; things that we might consider to be rubbish, or useless, or forgotten, have been given a whole new life.
Collaborating with someone that you really get along with is way more fun. We're basically just hanging out and building LEGO ... it wouldn't be even half as fun if it was with anybody else.
We hope people come on an adventure and really explore this world we have created. When you leave, we want you to feel like if you had stayed a little longer you would have found even more - there's always more to see.
