By Bryne McLaughlin 

Blue Republic
Toronto

Artists Anna Paasakas and Radoslaw Kudlinski (aka Blue Republic) have an uncanny knack for transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. In last summer's critically acclaimed exhibition "Waiting Room – works from future," the duo presented a gallery full of ordinary objects and items re-configured into a thoughtfully illusive narrative on polarized politics, personal space, boredom, entertainment and of course, the self-critical and self-reflexive nature of art making itself. From Jan. 25 to Feb. 20, Blue Republic is back with an exhibition sequel "Morning Daily." As in "Waiting Room," this new collection overflows with ideas, all charged with Blue Republic's poetically ironic take on the past, present and future. In The Last Supper (after Leonardo da Vinci), Passakas and Kudlinski have produced a 21st-century replica of the ultimate devotional image, replacing the beatified heads of the apostles with pie graphs culled from the Internet. A large gap in the centre stands in for you know Who. Speeding, the latest installation in their Beautiful Infections series, incorporates spiro-graphed maps of poor urban areas into a Merzbau model (a "city of totems") built from cut cardboard and tin cans, among other shanty-town materials. Morning Daily – ADD Bomb is tucked into a high corner counting down to a set explosion date in 1000 years (Should we care about a bomb—even though it's a bomb—that won't explode for a millennium?) while Low Resolution Man, a low-fidelity portrait of the modern artist, looks on. This is a smart exhibition. Don't miss it. (Peak Gallery, 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto, ON.) ... more Toronto

$4,000-$40,000. Closes tomorrow, 23 Morrow Ave., Toronto;
416-537-8108.

Feb. 3, 2005

Toronto Star

Blue Republic's message is mundane

To get to Blue Republic, you go through Yves Klein's "Blue Revolution" before turning left at Plato's Republic. You need also visit Peak Gallery now showing "Morning Daily," the new exhibition from Blue Republic's two only citizens, artists Anna Passakas and Radoslaw Kudlinski. In "The Blue Revolution," the late French artist felt that perfection could be found through perception in the cool blue of pure ultramarine. In The Republic, Socrates mused on a world "where artists had no place," says Passakas. Blue Republic merges both. "A lot of our work is about perception," she adds, "but from a position of speaking about things we only are interested in."Polish-born but active in Toronto for more than a decade, both Passakas and Kudlinski bring a highly politicized critical edge honed in Europe into line with a North American indulgence in consumer culture.

"Our main connection with Poland is our lack of trust in a utopia," says Passakas. "Communist rule, imposed on us from outside, taught us to be a little suspicious of certain ideas in circulation. There was a time when artists were very politically involved in things. Lately they are not. But we don't speak only from a political point of view. This show is not just about politics."

When politics is most directly the issue, the results are unnerving. With Gasvagen from Blind Spots (2004-2005), the familiar, reassuring splendour of some sort of Government-approved touristy image — a gentle curve along a lonely highway through a dense strand of trees — creates a horrifying anti-message clashing with the title and our understanding of the image.The Nazis' use of mechanically altered trucks and vans, the "gas wagons," where carbon monoxide was pumped directly into a space filled with prisoners en route to concentration camps, proved to be yet another highly efficient way of doling out death.
"This picture is in a way symbolic and very typical of many places in central and eastern Europe where mass executions took place, where there would be rows of birches along the side of a road," says Passakas.

"We tend to think there's no connection with this and with the present. We don't see a connection between that and Rwanda. With the (60th) anniversary (of the Russian liberation) of Auschwitz, we felt it was our way of saying something about it."
Gasvagen from Blind Spots is every bit as much about advertising — a case of making those old memories sparkle so that today's perception will shine away all that musty old history — as Blue Republic's The Last Supper "after Leonardo da Vinci" (2003-2004) is about aesthetic understanding at a pop cult level. This series of circular pie charts arranged unevenly along a horizontal section of a wall, rather like biblical figures unevenly spaced along a dinner table, "cracks" the famous image the way thriller readers crack Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.

A tourist-quality travel poster. Bits and pieces of junk making up the figure of Low Resolution Man (2005). Tin cans turned into mysterious sculptures for Speeding (from Beautiful Infections, 2004-2005). A good number of Blue Republic pieces "begin with whatever we have in the studio," says Passakas. "The piece Speeding is about uncontrollable growth, about cancerous growth. So we tried to use poor, commonplace materials that were appropriate to the topic. And it was appropriate to use tin cans and a lot of cardboard."Artists have been playing with stuff like this for years, going back to the ready-mades of the 1920s. But re-imagining a reconfigured familiar shape isn't the passport to understanding what Blue Republic is about. It's understanding how the process has now been filtered through the media that matters.

The show's title comes from a mixed-media sculpture called Morning Daily-ADD Bomb (2004-2005), which is really an ad bomb. It's due to explode "in 1,000 years," warns Blue Republic after there's just too great a build-up of media junk in the collective imagination.

The lead image in the artist duo Anna Passakas and Radoslaw Kudlinski’s (a.k.a. Blue Republic) latest exhibition Morning Daily seems innocuous enough at first glance.The large-scale digital photo print pictures a driver's-seat view of a rural road winding through the late-afternoon quiet of an autumnal forest. But this is no cottage country idyll and once you read the work's title, Gasvagen, more sinister under- tones begin to sink in. In the photo, Passakas and Kudlinski allude to the gas vans developed by the German SS during the Second World War and first used to terrible effect in the artists' native Poland. A German army driver may have viewed the same sort of scene en route to a mass grave. What had a moment before seemed like a fine country landscape is irrevocably transformed. And what of modem genocides and their own hidden truths?

This tactic of art as a metaphorical/elemental prompt for deeper real-world reflection continues in Speeding, a immature city installation constructed from odds and ends of cardboard, tin cans and plastic bottles. Ironically, the foundation of this small-scale urban environment is the debris of the industrial world; the same cast-off materials are used as building materials in the slum districts that surround modern cities. Speeding has the feel of the city built necessarily if haphazardly by the accumulation of the materials at hand, as much in the mode of Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau as in the survival reality of urban poverty. Skyscrapers in Blue Republic's city echo the pure form of Constantin Brancusi's Endless Column broken by tiered platforms detailed with Spirographed maps of urban slums. In this fusion of art history and modem reality, Speeding achieves a surprisingly organic synthesis of high culture and disenfranchised society.

Other works in the exhibition revealed Blue Republic's wry take on social institutions. The Last Supper (afterLeonardo da Vinci) is a full-scale representation of the iconic religious painting by Da Vinci but with pie graphs culled from the Internet set in place of the apostles' beatified heads. This is a modem monument to the business of religion and the religion of business. Low-Resolution Man, a classic portrait of the artist built from a cardboard box, is a dear and intentionally self-reflective demystification of the artist as glamorous celebrity. Finally, Morning Daily -ADD Time Bomb turns our current culture of fear into a lingering conundrum that reflects the general call to action that sounds through the exhibition. Set to detonate in 1,000 years, it poses an open question: Should we worry about a bomb-even though it's a bomb-if it won't explode for a millennium?

about the exhibition