Georgian Bay country will always be associated with the art of the Group of Seven - whose muscular paintings from the 1920s gave us all those sombre outcroppings of the Canadian Shield, scoured by wind and lashed by the waters of its lakes and bays. And all those bent pines.
But times have changed and so has art. When Anna Passakas and Radoslaw Kudlinski - the Polish-Canadian art duo known as Blue Republic - spent some time there this summer, they approached the brawny shores of Georgian Bay with brushes as well - but carrying buckets of lake water, not tubes of oil paint.
"We had no intention of exploring or analyzing the nature of cottage country," Kudlinski told me, on the phone from his Toronto studio. "Anna and I found ourselves, instead, engaged in a very ephemeral activity - making drawings in water on the rocks." And they went there armed, he says, with an absurdist aspiration: to bring objects and ideas to Georgian Bay that were clearly alien to those eternal rocky shores. By so doing they hoped to examine the limits of the very idea of "landscape." "We live in a time of changing paradigms," Kudlinski noted. "The eye has choices. Landscape obviously no longer means what it always meant, and we have constantly to revisit our vocabularies."
The result of this particular revisitation was a suite of eighteen stirring Water Drawings, preserved as photographs - now at Toronto's Peak Gallery. I asked Kudlinski how long a drawing with water would last before it dried up and disappeared. I was thinking maybe a half-hour or so. "About 20 seconds," he tells me. "Or maybe 35 seconds, maximum." You'd really have to scramble with the camera.
Passakas and Kudlinski are, in fact, old hands at water drawing. They have made their fugitive drawings in the course of all their recent art-related travels - to Japan, Malaysia, Poland, Norway. "We've made them on the streets, "says Kudlinski, "and in parking lots, on the steps of our hotels - everywhere." Kudlinksi points out that it was always the process of making the drawings that was important to them - not the act of preserving them as photographs.
The current Georgian Bay water drawings constitute a small but intense encyclopedia of the human experience. There isn't a pine tree or a canoe in any of them. Instead, there's a ladder - which, made momentarily of water, is a moving and maybe also a mordantly funny emblem of the vanity (and brevity) of human desires. There are watery floor plans for houses. A bar code (shown half evaporated in the photo). A pile of pills. A wan little house, drawn like a child's depiction of a house, fragile and momentary on a mighty slab of granite by the shore. There is a depiction of the human liver and kidneys. A keyboard. A lamp and its cord - with nothing but rock to plug into. They even drew an audience for their labours - a crowd of water-people, quickly drying into a memory.
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