It’s crazy how normal Michael Scott’s childhood was. Raised in South Jersey, he got along well with his younger sister, his parents never divorced, nothing traumatic ever happened to him. What, then, would prompt a 30-year-old man to create porn images out of Legos? Surely there must have been something wrong. “Actually, I lived a very happy childhood,” says the artist, whose large-scale Lego mosaics of male porn stars, frozen in action at the moment of orgasm, were the front runners of Nikolai Fine Art’s recent group exhibit Toy Show. “Now I’m just questioning those things that made me happy.”

With work so, er, stimulating, most viewers find themselves between a rock and a hard place, trying to draw quick and dirty conclusions about its meaning. Ruling out erotic fetishes, Scott actually flinches an the leftover ‘normal guy, weird art’ interpretation. The expressions in his Lego mosaics are something most of us see regularly (hopefully). The true perversion is in the decontextualizing of sex. “Like most boys, I spent some time visiting the porn world…” recalls the artist, who now finds himself absorbed in the task of unraveling the banal perfection that blankets suburbia. “I’m simply talking the time now to go back and pull apart the layers of my own history.”

Scott’s parking Lot and Sports Fields series give viewers an inside track on further extensions of Scott’s thinking and a wider glimpse at his largely autobiographical body of work. Schematics of real parking lots from Scott’s hometown take his graphic renderings to a new level, referring “not only to the large role which the car and parking lots play in the daily life of a suburbanite, but how almost unwittingly our daily activity is organized.”

Both the parking lots and the sports fields have a psychoachitectural feel, referring to proper and improper positions for middle class occupation. From the vantage-point of grappling for position, the three series have more in common than one might first surmise. Scott is spinning a conceptual web of place, space and propriety while trying to make retrospective sense of the subjects in his life. “Once you leave school and all the shelter that the art world is willing to afford you,” Scott reasons, “you start wondering how you can, or should, make your mark.” Scott decided to go back to his roots, looking for the pure essence of his personality. He landed in the middle of suburbia and has slowly worked to climb his way out. “I guess I’m trying to give it some meaning. It ‘s been so much a part of my life; if it has no meaning, I suppose I don’t either.”

Scott’s tendency to compartmentalize his own ideas is what drew him to represent these specific images. Slightly disgusted by the shadowy sweetness of suburbia’s gloss, he is also cursed by an obsession with organization. “Most of the play happens before I create the work,” he says, chuckling a the irony. Carefully diagramming his pieces before embarking upon their creation, Scott isn’t one to be swept away in the moment of creation. Nonetheless, his rigidity has bred a different sort of conceptualism. With a shoot-from-the-hip brand of thinking, Scott represents society’s boxes (lots, fields, TV images) by co-opting the box, hijacking it and passing it off as a new interpretation informed by years of slow and steady suburban enculturation.

Speaking of art imitating life, Scott’s not-so-torturous research regimen into the Lego series (hundreds of hours of porno-watching) led him to the conclusion that “all the good stuff happens somewhere between ‘action’ and ‘cut.’” With endearing awkwardness, he describes the ‘hard’ work involved in finding the “perfect” climax shot: It must be emotive, dramatic, and a ‘clean’ image – that means no feet or other obstructions blocking his view. View-blocking is something Scott is so over.

More than anything, Scott’s into making art for himself. “Indulging your urges and doing it for yourself is a little like masturbating,” he admits. But there’s always an audience for that, and Scott is happy to play to the voyeurs. There’s a hint of romantic, emotional benevolence in his work, far more intimate than a stranger’s coital face could ever be. Scott captures commonality in a way that speaks volumes about the basic language of human desire and frustration (which often go hand in hand-especially in the suburbs). It is in this way that Scott can realistically claim that he “recognizes” himself in the faces of the porn stars. Likewise, it is in this vein that viewers can insert themselves into Scott’s post hoc autobiographical narrative, if only by virtue of their shared relationship with his subjects and materials - Legos, parking lots and ping pong tables. We’ve all been there and done that. Scott forces us to ask ourselves about the significance.

So what’s next for the vernacular artist? “I’m taking a break from flat surfaces,” he says, with the sort of nervous anticipation of an emerging artist daring to branch out from his signature. He’s currently at work on a series of 3-D domestic pieces, including a windowless, doorless Lego home situated atop hollow cabinetry. Scott, whose remarkable craftsmanship was refined in a year of postgraduate stone-carving in Italy, is deeply engrossed in self-criticism with his work. Referring again, with a grain of salt, to life in the ‘burbs, Scott recalls that his family used to try “every five years or so” to demonstrate their recent good fortune by slapping a new layer of formica on their cabinets. “We weren’t really adding anything more to our lives than 1/16th of an inch; yet we had to show others that we did well, that we were up-to-date.” Such recognitions place Scott ahead of his years, admitting his family’s faults – or worse, their banality - in swooning narrative pieces.

“The suburbs are a fantasy world,” Scott concludes. “I’m just trying to question that fantasy, to find something redeeming in it, to redeem myself. Maybe I’m reaching for something that’s not there. In any case, I’m trying to make people look at everyday things differently. To see it, not just look at it.” Even if the first encounter feels like love at first sight.