Laboratory Gallery
Conference Room
18.01. - 17.02.2002

Stach Szablowski: The suspense

Just a little bit more - that's a title of two emotionally straining situations, a little obsessive and a little exaggerated, which attack a viewer with an expressive effect, a mixture of anxiety and absurd humor. Agnieszka Kalinowska flirts with a convention of a sculpted group. She creates figural compositions with posed figures, narration and action stopped like in a still shot. And yet the solidity of a form is contrasted with ephemeral materials.

The figures, made out of rubber bands, are flexible. Their shape constantly changes - according to the forces and pressures, which are applied. Agnieszka Kalinowska uses this plasticity of figures by stretching them to the maximum, she cumulates force, deformation and expression into a frozen moment of the highest tension. This is the tension between figures, between the one, that is pulling and the one, that's being pulled, between "I want" and "I don't want". We don't know the intentions of this situation's characters just as we don't know what is going to happen next. Agnieszka is only interested in that, what is happening just before the event takes place, when a dynamic relations between two figures result in the greatest deformation of their bodies.

Figures braided from serpentines emerge out of the chaos of carnival decorations - and it's not at all clear whether they are people lost in a post-party mess or just an accidental permutation of chaos. Juxtaposed with a mechanical hardware - industrial floor cleaner - they seem light and ephemeral. They remind of a final chapter of Alice in Wonderland, in which Queen of Hearts courtesans and praetorians change suddenly into a packet of cards, and then into dry leaves blown with the wind. In Agnieszka's works instead of wind appears a floor cleaner - a device always ready to take control and "induce order" into tired from partying "human material".

"Just a little bit more" is an exhibition about objectification of men and humanization of objects. It's a fantasy of multiplication of small, elusive things and about "making something out of nothing" - a man out of rubber bands, a crowd out of paper serpentines. The project with rubber figures is a sculpted moment of suspense and baroque dynamics caught in a flesh of the most intense formal, material and dramatic tension. On the other hand installation in the banquet room is a narration about people and machines, lives of objects, disappearance of the bodies and expansion of technology.

Aneta Szylak: A disaster in a toy store

Agnieszka Kalinowska's works, when I saw them for the first time, sent an ubiquitous message of playfulness. Inflatable figures out of colorful plastic were not all toys but images of sex, violence and body's physiological functions. However contrast between bold, toy-like material and represented scenes was not at all oppressive. It irritated me though, as I was not prepared for the unpleasant message. This kind of innocent brutality is Agnieszka Kalinowska's field of exploration.

Her recent works, made out of rubber bands and serpentines, are colorful after-images of a body, that disappeared from its representation. Her vision of human being, apparently playful, colorful and easy is in fact cruel. Figures situated among toys and machines seem weak, disposable and passive. Rubber bands, a banal and available material, were used as a building form for two natural size figures. White and red rubber bands are shaped into a human figure, copying its color, texture of the body, musculature with visible fibers and fat. The effect is absolutely anatomical, although an abject strategy is missing. One of the figures holds onto an element of the room, another one grabs its free hand and pulls hard. One seems to defend itself from violence, the other one uses force. We don't know sources of this violence: we don't know whether this force emerges from aggression or fear. This tour de force is built on a sequence of recollections of ideas such as flexibility, stretching, human-rubber, tension, durability. A relationship based on power seems to be the most essential in this project. The used force has a distancing effect, not only physically but also emotionally. Adaptation to the surroundings is a reaction to a stimulation. By surrendering to somebody else's action, a person changes in a way, that can not be determined and which does not have to be directly tied to a person's will and conscious acting.

Serpentine figures belong to a joyous era of consumerism: its blind appetite for "more and more" and identity based on commodities. The figures are so light, that they could almost fly on the force of our breath. Not as obvious in a body representation, they function on a more symbolic level. These figures have the inertia of a social life - shown during a carnival, the saddest time, when all values are being reversed. Carnival period becomes a new context, a new frame of interpretation for art, based on elements of play and fun.

In Agnieszka Kalinowska's images lurks brutality of tools, which are weapons of a domesticated man. Lawn-mowers, drillers, tongs and other accessories appear here in a form of fetishized gadgets. Hardware stores like Restoration Hardware or supermarkets for tinkers change technical accessories into objects of fetishist desires just as shoes, perfumes or lingerie. It's not a necessity of tools, but a desire to possess and collect them is a key reason for visiting those stores. Toys for kids and adults are treated in the same manner. Agnieszka shows them as ubiquitous toys and objects of desire. She is interested in lack of self-consciousness of civilization of gadgets in its various manifestations. Some elements from her paintings are naturally transplanted into her installations.

Agnieszka Kalinowska's works express helplessness, abandon, influentiality and self-dependence. They show presence in blurry, uncontinous structures, which can't be seen as a whole from a level of an individual. They suggest a fragmentary nature of a world, in which this individual lives. Disposable but sensual and exciting substances, out of which Agnieszka makes her works - plastic, rubber, plasteline - deepen a feeling of time, that limits everything that surrounds and constitutes an individual. Aggression and brutality are juxtaposed with fragility and lack of durability. Human existence is shown as a tragic accident in a toy store, which can not be repaired and go without warranty.

Trans. E.S.

Agnieszka Kalinowska <agnieszka.kalinowska@free.art.pl>
(1971), is a graduate of Painting Department of Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan (diploma 1998). She paints, makes inflatable objects from synthetics, makes videos, installations and sculptures from atypical materials (like rubber bands, confetti, carnival serpentines). In her works, she uses ready-mades, photos and technical devices. Agnieszka Kalinowska recalls pop aesthetics, visual language of the mass culture, advertisements and above all aesthetics of toys. The main character in her works is a world of objects and technology - represented as an autonomous reality, in which human being are absent, endangered or not necessary. Agnieszka personizes machines and objects, with which we surround ourselves - they not only look to be more better and more powerful then humans, but also it seems that they could function quite well without our help.
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