John Wood and Paul Harrison Production still from ‘Shelf’ (2007) copyright John Wood and Paul Harrison images courtesy of the artists

John Wood and Paul Harrison Production still from ‘Shelf’ (2007) copyright John Wood and Paul Harrison images courtesy of the artists

 

Answers to Questions: John Wood and Paul Harrison
February 17 - May 16, 2010
Opening reception Friday, February 26, 2010, 5:30-7:30 p.m.

The University Art Museum is pleased debut the first U.S. museum survey of the British artistic team 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.

John Wood and Paul Harrison is organized by the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, Texas.

Ann Diener work in progress

Artist-in-Residence: Ann Diener
Residency period: January 20-February 14, 2010
The finished project will remain on view through June 20, 2010
Opening reception Friday, February 26, 2010, 5:30-7:30 p.m.

Artist-in-Residence: Ann Diener

During the next three weeks, come observe Santa Barbara artist Ann Diener hard at work in the University Art Museum. Diener, known for her energetic abstractions, will realize her newest drawing directly on the wall of the Museum. Witness the process during regular Museum hours and then return to see the finished composition.
In Diener's drawings past and present collide revealing the myriad ways Southern California's landscape has changed from farming plots worked by individual families to large-scale tracts owned by agri-business corporations, or even more frequently, to suburban housing developments. Her intricately, detailed drawings convey these rapid transformations through the energetic, almost swirling line work she employs to render glimpses of majestic, corporate greenhouses, cookie-cutter tract housing, sprouting vines, outsized insects and rounded fruits.  During this unique residency, undergraduate students from the Department of Art and the College of Creative Studies will assist Diener in making creative decisions and implementing the room-size drawing.