John Wood’s and Paul Harrison’s names may sound familiar to the audiences and professionals within the Hungarian art scene as their videos have been included in Hungarian exhibitions more than once. What is a lesser known fact, however, even to the Hungarian public, is that not only did they present their joint work for the first time at the Mediawave Festival in Gyôr in 1993 (the year their collaboration dates from), but their first solo show was also held in this country, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Dunaújváros, in 1998. Their work has been widely shown at exhibitions both in Britain and internationally, as well as being broadcast on various TV channels (MTV Europe, SBS Australia, Channel 4, Arte, etc.).
5 Rooms comprises their most recent works. From a certain aspect, these pieces are similar to their previous works, which have won favour with their audience primarily owing to their subtle humour. John Wood and Paul Harrison manipulate objects so that their unusual aspects and features are brought into focus, recording these processes in the form of short video works. Human presence in these works is often the subject of indirect, transposed experience, for even without actors appearing in the individual episodes, the partaking of an agent controlling the events from beyond the frame remains perceptible.
Another point of interest in their works is that while they lend themselves to being classified under traditional art categories (sculpture, performance, architecture, drawing, etc.), the viewer would rather not simplify them by confining the pieces to a single category.
A new element in their most recent work is that the camera moves, so that the series of images that earlier appeared as detached clips become united in a sequence, while the unusual way of looking at things and humour so characteristic of the artist collaborators remains perfectly intact.
Paul Harrison was born in Wolverhampton in 1966 and John Wood in Hong Kong in 1969. Harrison lives and works in Birmingham, and Wood in Bristol. Both artists were trained in painting at Bath College and are represented by the London-based fa projects.
