Board

1993 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

3 min 02

John Wood & Paul Harrison

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Board has a deadpan quality worthy of Buster Keaton. With this work, Wood and Harrison create an intimate, formally structured mise-en-scène in which they use their own bodies in interaction with a wooden board. The artists elaborate an orchestration of the comic consequences of inertia, gravity, and the law of falling bodies in this low-tech physics experiment. Their mix of Conceptual art and slapstick conveys a sense of inspired pranksterism. Board (1993) is one of the very first works they made in collaboration.

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John Wood and Paul Harrison have been working collaboratively since 1993 producing single screen and installation based video works.Their work investigates the relationship between the human figure and architecture, developed through short form video with particular emphasis on actions being formulated and resolved within a given duration. Wood and Harrison have exhibited extensively in France and the USA. Their works form part of the collections of the Tate, Centre Pompidou and MOMA. Their artistic practice spans the use of the frame, minimal aesthetics, associations of everyday objects and low-tech visual tricks, the making of micro-trivial actions – whose results are invariably between obvious failure and random success. Born in 1969 and 1966 Wood and Harrison live and work in Bristol.

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Colors:

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• superficial.s.03
• action.n.01
• minimal.a.01
• everyday.s.03
• minor.s.10
• failure.n.01