Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Bath Spa University
John Wood and Paul Harrison: Some Words, Some More Words (solo exhibition and tour with accompanying publication)
Wood and Harrison have worked collaboratively on vidéos, objects, installations and publications since 1993. In this exhibition, by displaying drawing and diagrammatic models and text-based work, Harrison & Wood revealed how they exchange ideas and manufacture their work. Their practice engages with notions of the pictorial and cinematographic illusion, visual plays on frame, scale and perspective, recalling the silent physicality of Buster Keaton, the spatial isolation of Samuel Becket, the existential, studio-based experiments of Bruce Nauman and the reflexive humour of Vita Acconci.
Using a variety of simple props, the artists perform with their bodies in studio-bound experiments. Mostly single screen videos, these works follow on from early artists video and the silent cinema, acknowledging the aesthetic boundaries of technology by the pictorial framing, spatial organisation, duration and of the singular moment. More recent work uses both the static, locked off camera and the tracking shot to observe the designed transformations of everyday objects and spatial situations and so the revelations of the moving camera and the use of off-screen space are utilised to create suspenseful loops where objects perform the unexpected.
Some Words, Some More Words included twenty-nine works (nine videos, two objects, two photographs, six drawings, ten prints); twenty-five works were made during the period (2008-) with all the works being exhibited for the first time. The exhibition was accompanied by a publication (A123456, ISBN: 10 :190486452X), essays by Barbara London (Curator, MOMA USA), Lucy Steeds (Editor, Afterall) and Nigel Prince (Executive Director, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver).
