Answers to Questions: John Wood & Paul Harrison
06.04.2011 - 10.01.2011
Answers to Questions is the first U.S. museum survey of the British artistic team of John Wood and Paul Harrison.
Combining aesthetic restraint and slapstick performance, Wood and Harrison are ingenious inventors, stuntmen and occasional masochists who often employ their own bodies as “raw material.” Their low-tech films contain no special effects or gimmicks. Instead, using a variety of simple props, the artists primarily remain sculptors who use video to record the actions of their various experiments.
Their video shorts reflect witty references to early cinema and reveal a sophisticated awareness of art and art history, as they highlight the quality of inventive play behind all art. Wood and Harrison’s unique blend of the absurd and erudite, the high and low, the philosophical and funny, captures both a sense of wonder and the thrill of experimentation, all grounded in a reverence for the physics of everyday life.
Answers to Questions: John Wood and Paul Harrison is organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and curated by Toby Kamps, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Menil Collection, Houston. The exhibition is made possible by the Houston Endowment, Inc., the City of Houston through the Houston Museum District Association, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Texas Commission on the Arts, and the patrons, benefactors, and donors to the CAMH’s major Exhibition Fund. The Artspace gratefully acknowledges additional support from the H&R Block Foundation and the Missouri Arts Council.
Answers to Questions: John Wood and Paul Harrison is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Toby Kamps, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Menil Collection, Houston, as well as color reproductions of featured work, and the artists’ biography and bibliography.
