Blue Republic: The Order of Disorder
Blue Republic Water Drawings: 12:02 2009 Courtesy the artists and Georgia Scherman Projects
Artists Anna Passakas and Radoslaw Kudlinski, better known as Blue Republic, have a knack for drawing perennial truths out of everyday absurdities. A case in point is “Weather Report,” their latest exhibition of photography, sculpture and drawing, which closes this weekend at Georgia Scherman Projects in Toronto. Canadian Art’s Bryne McLaughlin recently caught up with the pair at the gallery to discuss their new work and the power of boredom, chess and 24-karat gold in revealing the order of disorder.
Bryne McLaughlin: “Weather Report” opens with the photo series Water Drawings, which documents temporary interventions produced by painting with water on the shorelines of the Canadian Shield. Is this contrast between the fleeting instant of your mark-making and the deep history of an idyllic landscape purely existential, or is there more to consider here?
Anna Passakas: The Water Drawings are in some ways related to the climate and the history of natural resources, but most of all they are about creating reality out of scratch. It’s like you are on a deserted island and there is nothing, you just have to conceptualize things to yourself.
Radoslaw Kudlinski: It’s as if you are in this empty space that is unpolluted by human concepts, so the work is pretty much born out of boredom, but a joyful type of boredom. You feel that you are creating something ex nihilo. These works were done in the cottage environment of Georgian Bay but we have also done water drawings in abandoned parking lots, on sidewalks and in other urban settings, which offer another existential paradigm. So, yes, if you think about the millions of years that it took to develop these rock formations against the tiny frame of existence in which human culture has been able to produce objects, there is an obvious paradox between these momentary gestures by us as artists and the duration of this massive natural geological environment.
AP: As always, we like to play with patterns and surfaces. These drawings are like water graffiti that exists for a few minutes and then is gone. That sense of materiality and the absurd is important to our work. Otherwise things can become too serious and I don’t think that interests us.
BM: Which leads to another set of works in the exhibition, Untitled in Black and White. Here you’ve taken recognizable game boards and pieces but have mixed and rearranged them without rules or the expected game-playing reference points.
AP: This is about changing the rules of the game. You often see this in politics. So we’ve used a lot of different strategies, for instance setting up watercolour paints as chess pieces, or turning a playing board upside down, making it impossible for any game to actually take place.
RK: I think that because there is a complete removal of the rules, it leaves this kind of residue that looks familiar but has no purpose. If you want to be inside of this game structure you have to rethink it from the beginning. It’s pretty much the same for these as sculptural objects; they look familiar but because of shifting paradigms you have to be more creatively involved.
AP: Also, things in the world are changing very fast. All over, you see attempts to predict the future and to write new rules. But it’s not easy to do. To play this game you have to improvise at every moment.
Blue Republic Untitled in Black and White 2010 Installation view Courtesy the artists and Georgia Scherman Projects
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