Output details

John Wood and Paul Harrison: Of Knowing Where You Are, included in the group exhibition Space Revised with accompanying catalogue.

Space Revised included work by Bob Braine & Leslie C. Reed; Elín Hansdóttir; Erik Olofsen; Guido van der Werve; John Wood & Paul Harrison; and was accompanied by a catalogue that includes an essay by Stefanie Bottcher.

Of Knowing Where You Are, 2009, exemplarily demonstrates Harrison & Wood’s turning towards combinations of image and text, and forms their first animated work. ‘In front of this black surface, words, fragments of sentences, general descriptions of situations are superimposed and, in rhythmic sequence, are combined with symbols and the simplest geometric signs, like a point or a line. Primarily through this interaction of symbol and text the surface of the image is stretched optically into three-dimensional space. The plastic representation generates depth and with that suggests being incorporated with a system made up of spatial coordinates. Thus the black monitor screen surface for instance is intersected by a white line, which in turn metamorphoses into the flow of a street, when two other lines meet it. But such a moment is always only of the tiniest duration. In correspondence with the changing sequence of signs the presentation is subordinated to constant change and jumps between two- and three-dimensional pictorial space. Through diverse means the search for a positioning, orientation and one’s own standpoint is playfully- nonetheless formally exceedingly reduced- circled.” Stefanie Bottcher