Output details

John Wood and Paul Harrison: Things That Happen (Solo exhibition and accompanying publication)

This was an exhibition of 62 works: 10 videos (7 made after January 2008) plus 32 drawings and 20 prints from 2011. The exhibition featured ‘10x10’ (2011), a single screen video comprised of an apparent continuous vertical tracking shot down the exterior of a hundred-storey office block, looking into the windows. A single figure undertakes various jobs and tasks. The video explores having a job, killing time, cinematic narrative, and repetition. With the passing of each floor more information is gradually revealed.

This idea of cinema was further explored with ‘Bored Astronauts on the Moon’ (2011) and ‘Unrealistic Mountaineers’ (2012). Both videos explore how everyday life sometimes looks like a film, especially if you put music to it, and at the same time extraordinary things sometimes seem so normal or mundane that you don’t actually realise you could be in a film. They also investigated ideas about exploration; the notion of conquering space, and striving to get somewhere. But when you arrive, it’s not quite how you imagined, and you wonder what to do once you are actually there. These works all relied on the construction of life-size sets, an approach further developed with ‘English Disaster’ (2012), (a homage to disaster movies) where a detailed scale model of an English pier was constructed, and filmed as it burnt down.

A publication accompanied the exhibition – in the form of 4 booklets - published Carroll/Fletcher, essay by Ian Bourn, and a DVD published by Bath Spa University and Carroll/Fletcher entitled 'Nothing Special'.

Reviews included: Things that happen, Art Review, May 2012, So Different, So Appealing, March 2012 by Henry Little in This is Tomorrow, March 2012, by Gabriel Coxhead in Time Out, March 2012. An interview with John Wood and Paul Harrison was published in It’s Nice That No.8, March 2012.