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blue republic
waiting room – works from future | july 2- july 27, 2004
"Witty show mixes politics, buffoonery"
National Post | The Big Picture | July 10, 2004
by Catherine Osborne

Witty show mixes politics, buffoonery

I love this show. Blue Republic's para-conceptual work is about life, art and economic and political imbalances around the globe, but you wouldn't know it at first glance. At first glance, you get a roomful of jokey sculptures with smart, zippy titles, like the stepladder covered in Lego pieces, titled Beautiful Infections. But then there are works like Cambodia, in which a pair of flip-flops are embedded in a bag of plaster, which symbolize in quiet, minimalist terms a nation's chronic impoverishment and immobility. Politically charged, yes, but the Toronto-based collective (Anna Passakas and Radoslaw Kudlinski, who are both from Poland) avoids sloganeering. As in Middle Eastern League: Israel vs. Palestine 0:0, a pair of lush-looking still-life photographs of a dozen apples cut into squares and stacked like bricks. Both pictures are of the same apples rearranged in slightly different rows, indicating the minor (when you get right down to it) distinctions between Team Israel and Team Palestine. As for the garbage on the floor, which has been swept in circles with a radius of what could be called our personal space (the span of an extended arm), it's part of Blue's Limited Activities series, and another shrewd comment on our tendency to keep our own yards clean at the cost of everyone and everything else.

$50- $9,000. closes July 27, 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108.


 

Globe and Mail | "Great-looking witticisms" | Saturday, July 17, 2004 | Page R13
By GARY MICHAEL DAULT
Blue Republic is a two-person art collective -- though it sometimes collaborates with other culture-workers as well -- that generates objects and installations seen throughout the world.

Although Blue Republic is a Toronto-based duo (Anna Passakas and Radoslaw Kudlinski), a glance at the couple's list of exhibitions and projects lends some idea of the scope of their activities and energies: There have been recent exhibitions in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Brazil and Cambodia, as well as in Montreal and Toronto.
Their current exhibition, now at Toronto's Peak Gallery, is called Waiting Room --Works from Future (not "the" future as you might expect, but something evidently larger than that).

It consists of a number of discrete objects, constructions and installations, some of which are simple and bounded and witty -- such as Get to the Point, a stack of newspapers with
a conical hole drilled into the top so that looking into the hole is like looking down at a distant vanishing point (read yourself to oblivion) -- while others are elaborately multivalenced, such as their madly beautiful, sweetly nihilistic Shredded Studio, a muster of cardboard boxes holding the shredded, pulverized, powdered, granulated remains of their studio (where do they work now?) and everything in it (wallboard, drafting table, furniture, clay pots -- everything).

Formally speaking, everything Blue Republic makes (or assembles) looks great. Unlike other artists who use castoffs and ready-mades in their work, their pieces are invariably handsome -- often stirringly so.

Furthermore, and most importantly, Blue Republic has a deft way with metaphor and, by extension, the generation of political ideas (though they might well deny the primacy, in their work, of their politicizing).

Their Cambodia, for example, is simply a bag of plaster with two sandal-like thongs attached. The result is a heavy, stolid, entirely unworkable piece of footwear. A dispiriting emblem for the (perhaps) endless difficulty of rebuilding a nation?
Their ladder (from a body of work called Beautiful Infections) is an ordinary metal stepladder that has somehow become encrusted with colonies of Lego pieces, in the same way as if it had been in the sea and come up covered with barnacles.
Ladders are invariably emblems of ascension and aspiration (one goes up a ladder; one scarcely ever thinks about coming down again). This accretion of Lego bits, however, compromises the ladder's function.

Even though they might represent hobbyism and constructive play, the Lego elements nevertheless subtract something important from the ladder's ability to help us with our upward mobility. The pretty little Lego chunks start, therefore, to look threatening, sinister -- an infestation rather than a preoccupation.

And this seems to be the way Blue Republic proceeds: from fugitive wit to meaningful meditation, from junk to junket, from mess to mission, from one-liner to epic discourse.

$50 -- $9,000. Until July 27, 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108.

 
Toronto Star | It's showtime on Morrow Ave. | Thursday, July22, 2004
by Peter Goddard

It's showtime on Morrow Ave.

When it comes to gallery-going in the summer, it all depends where you are. In Yorkville, where the tourists cluster, it's like being on the deck of some humungous tour boat where the T-shirts move faster than the paintings. The tree-bereft Queen St. W. is the complete opposite: Dusty, hot and tough slogging at times, it feels like a scene out of Gunfight At OK Corral, although if you saw "draw" here, no one gets shot.

Then there's Morrow Ave. Being so near The Junction, where Dundas St. meets Bloor St. W., Morrow Ave. — a truncated two-block street running north of Dundas past a cozy sports bar and a lumber mill — is in an area that feels more alive than any other part of downtown. Everything goes to extremes here. You can find little old ladies worrying about their tomato plants in their backyards. You can also find your car missing.
You can also find "Waiting Room," by Blue Republic, the best show in town, on to July 27 at Peak Gallery (23 Morrow).

Then there's the substantial but sexless group show, "XXX ... The Summer Show 2004" at Christopher Cutts (21 Morrow) to the end of August, as well as the best rumour of the day at Olga Korper Gallery (17 Morrow).

Since the galleries all share the same small courtyard, you must assume different addresses are used only to keep the hefty cheques arriving in the mail from getting mixed up.

"Waiting Room — Works From Future," to give this knockout exhibition mostly of ready-mades its full name, works superbly in the here and now. Wonderfully original, it provides you with the delicious sensation of having clicked your imagination into fast-forward, letting you pick up instantly on its many contradictions, all its fun and war games.

Nothing actually moves here, particularly Cambodia (2004), a single heavy sack of plaster with a pair of sandals attached, a sign of poverty strapped to political and economic stasis. Yet here's the strange part: Everything feels high-speed, particularly Shredded Studio (2004), a corner filled with the neatly boxed bits and pieces of everything originally in the artists' studio — including the furniture.

With other shows you get a lot of "beginning of the end" stuff. With "Waiting Room" you get the end of the beginning right off. There is no waiting, that's the electric joke carried through the entire exhibition.

Ready-mades ask for recollection and re-examination. Look this is a rabbit — or is it a duck? (2004) from Alterations, reflects the long and honourable history of the ready-made as the Blue Republic vamp on Bicycle Wheel (1913), by the king of ready-mades, Marcel Duchamp.

But Blue Republic wants its ready-mades to function less as reconsidered objects and more as retooled ideas. For all the stuff collected here, this remains an ideologically driven exhibition Blue Republic — even the collective's name is terrific — is in fact a pair of Toronto-based Polish-born artists, Anna Passakas and Radoslaw Kudlinski, who've shown internationally by thinking geopolitically. Two vibrantly blue photographs make up a wall-wide main piece, Middle Eastern League: Israel vs. Palestine, 0:0. Each images features two rows of square-cut apple cores arranged the way soccer squads get their official team photo taken.

The message is clear: Israel and Palestine may be fighting to a draw in the Garden of Eden but Blue Republic says, "Bite me."
The Cutts gallery has paraded out its A-list of house artists, with some exceptional work from Eldon Garnet, Sanchez brothers Carlos and Jason, as well as from Janieta Eyre. But the killer piece is Richard Stipl's Secret Weapon II (2003), a sort of Renaissance chapel ceiling turned on its side, with the lovely little silver nymphs floating in space although attached to the wall.

At the Olga Korper Gallery, a lot of the action in recent weeks has been on the phone. Ever since Korper made a modest investment in a building just off the Queen St. W. area, rumours have been flying that she's moving out of Morrow Ave.

"Nuts," says Korper (or something like that) while claiming she won't be leaving until she croaks, "probably talking to someone on the phone."

$50- $9,000. closes July 27, 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto; 416-537-8108.

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