With a satisfied sigh, Zander Jeney snapped in place the final scaled up 3D printed brick of his Masters of Fine Arts thesis exhibition at the Beeler Gallery for the Columbus College of Art & Design earlier this spring. This work featured giant, scaled up 3D printed LEGO blocks that deconstructed Jeney’s digital abstract sculptures in an effort to let the audience freely walk through his mind’s workflow on designing with LEGO. By turning the gallery floor into his canvas, Jeney helps the audience view the world again with the wonder and perspective of a child’s eyes.
Jeney fell in love with LEGO blocks and how they brought his ideas to life at the early age of four. His first creation? A swashbuckling pirate ship ready to cry havoc on the high seas. As Jeney grew more experienced, he started creating his own bricks to enable more complex replicas.
I loved systematic chaos and being able to make anything that came to mind and the fact that I could use my hands to build.
This desire to manipulate what exists in his mind led to the creation of replicas, miniature sculptures, and works of art created with digital LEGO bricks and rendered on screen with digital design tools like Blender, Maya, and Fusion360. Jeney came to IC3D armed with a desire to explore 3D printing and to challenge himself to break out of the confines of virtual LEGO bricks by making his digital creations life-sized and real. IC3D helped refine the many ideas into the tangible components needed to make his vision viable.
IC3D had all the resources & tools to make the dream & vision come to life. IC3D helped make my idea something that could be executed.
As Jeney’s digital abstract sculptures were broken down into their constituent parts, bricks and panels were prototyped with Recycled PETG. Recycled PETG is made with post-industrial & post-consumer PETG resin once designed for the waste stream at the IC3D factory in Columbus, Ohio. R-PETG is go-to material for the prototyping process due to the high-flow rate, outstanding layer adhesion, and the affordable low cost.
Until you have the prototypes printed and in your hands, you won’t know exactly how things fit together and whether your design can stand on its own. When you only have a file the laws of gravity are not represented — getting digital sculptures to stand up in a physical space was a new consideration for me.
You need a physical piece from the digital world to see how it fits into the real world. This leads to experimentation, trial, and error. Thankfully, Sean, Matt, and Gavin at IC3D helped to minimize the time and costs this process required.
Will I be back to IC3D? For sure! This wasn’t a job for IC3D. This felt like a collaboration.
The IC3D production team moved to yellow production grade PETG as each design was finalized and ready for the gallery. The pile of 3D printed bricks grew massive, dwarfed only by the growing size of Jeney’s future plans.
An expression of unique ideas is often best conveyed through uncommon means. History is full of great artists gravitating to modern techniques and materials because it affords them the opportunity to expand their visceral vocabularies. Additive Manufacturing provides the creative mind a faster way to express various iterations of ideas. While an idea is materializing, the next idea can already begin.
At the end of the day, when we see 3D printing, we see possibilities. From food to product design, to furniture and architecture, to products and art. This excitement and potential is a modernization of materials and methods, especially in pop art. 3D printing as a respected art medium with digital tools is becoming as valued as expertise with traditional mediums.
Jeney is taking his passion for controlled chaos to the streets with plans for large-scaled art displayed in public spaces, where the hard geometric lines of traditional LEGO brick shapes are snapped together with organic free-flowing sculptures on a vast scale. At the other end of the traditional LEGO scales, Jeney plans on continuing to create custom brick designs to better enable automotive replicas.
IC3D is central Ohio’s largest additive manufacturing center with an in-house team of engineers and designers ready to collaborate and offer custom additive manufacturing solutions. IC3D is supported by a fleet of custom 3D printers ready to create the answers to your challenges.
