Dutch artist Levi van Veluw has coated a dining room and the five people living in it with 20,000 Scrabble-style wooden blocks. Pretty strange, right? Well, that's not the strange part. Those round-headed guys communing somberly around the table? Not mannequins. As one can witness after the jump, the titular "Family" is made from moving, breathing people, taking the whole piece from mildly odd to actually kind of mesmerizing. Van Veluw is not the first to deck out a living space in something weird—last year, a Polish artist cloaked a Manhattan "apartment" in a sweater—but he might very well be the first to cover his person, mouth and eyes included, along with the space. "Family" is just one part of a self-portrait series called "Origin of the Beginning," in which domestic spaces are covered with a fastidious mosaic of strange materials. Van Veluw says the works reflect his attempts in childhood and adolescence to gain control of his life by obsessively trying to dominate his surroundings. In doing so, he may have finally ousted the NYC apartment that was formerly considered to be the most hardwood-clad in the nation. Well, maybe it's a tie.
· Family, An Installation of a Family & Room Covered in Wooden Blocks [Laughing Squid]
· Please Say Hello to World's First Thoroughly Crocheted Apartment [Curbed National]
· Fifth Ave. Apartment Contains 70 Percent of World's Mahogany Supply [Curbed NY]