Transforming von Bartha’s large 850m2 Basel gallery space into a networked labyrinth for their immersive creation, British-artist duo John Wood & Paul Harrison are back to their wildly inventive ways in Some Things are Undesigned.
With a body of work that encompasses performance, sculpture, installation and dance; the pair delve into physical and psychological environments, often constructing architectural models of varying scales that mimic theatrical stage sets. Having formed a long-standing collaboration that began in the early 1990’s, they share a colourful history and obviously a good joke or two, their work often spiked with an idiosyncratic humour that borders on the absurd.
Some Things are Undesigned is subject to this wit. Entering the exhibition, the viewer navigates a carefully constructed maze. Built from walls of cardboard and featuring doors of different heights, the structure references another work entitled A Film about a City (2015), a wooden architectural model of a cityscape that seemingly paints a utopian ideal, but underneath reveals discarded projects and failed dreams.
Comical video-work Semi Automatic Painting Machine (2014) also stars in the exhibition; in a flurry of colour, a machine spray gun attacks its surroundings with paint. Ultimately, everything is given a slapstick coat of colour. Toying with the idea of transformation and camouflage, the video translates as a bawdy visual joke.
Its interesting to note that despite being divided into fragmented quarters, the exhibition operates as a cohesive whole, with objects assuming the identity of those found within video works elsewhere in the exhibition. Designed so that the viewers decide their own fate when embarking on a route through the exhibition, there is a sense of playfulness at work in the air.
John Wood and Paul Harrison: Some Things are Undesigned is showing now at von Bartha, Basel
