Performance

The Contemporary Art Gallery and Ballet BC present the world premiere performance of Very Clear Instructions in partnership with The Polygon Gallery.

Following the exhibition I DIDN’T KNOW I DIDN’T KNOW IT at the beginning of 2016, John Wood and Paul Harrison embarked on an intensive sequence of improvisatory workshops with the dancers of Ballet BC. What emerged is an ambitious commission between two of Vancouver’s most important cultural organizations, a new dance work involving movement, direction, costumes and staging.

Wood and Harrison have long been concerned with the body, characteristically employing a vocabulary that connects into the spatial concerns and material world of choreography and contemporary dance. They engage with attributes such as trust, cause and effect, action and reaction, and the physical arena and dimensions in which movement and gesture occurs with characteristic observations surrounding the human condition.

This new performance is structured as ten episodes such as “Falling,” “Right angles” or “Lean,” and combines much of their ongoing preoccupations with a keen delight, humour and reflection on human endeavor. Rooted in a distillation of everyday gestures and routine, a true conversation between the visual art world of John Wood and Paul Harrison and that of the dance corps of Ballet BC emerges. The familiar is made charmingly and compellingly strange, altering our perceptions as we move through the world.

Biography

John Wood and Paul Harrison live and work in Bristol, UK. They have many notable solo exhibitions including Galeria Vera Cortes, Lisbon (2017); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2016); Von Bartha, Basel; ICC, Tokyo (2015); Carroll/Fletcher, London (2015); Museo de Antioquia, Medellin, Columbia (2014). They have also participated in group exhibitions worldwide: Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York (2016); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (2015); OK Centre for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria (2014); Kochi Museum of Art (2014); Okayama Museum of Art (2014); Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro(2013). Their Work is held in various public collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris; MoMA, New York; Ludwig Collection, Aachen; Tel Aviv Museum; Kadist Foundation, Paris and Tate, London. John Wood and Paul Harrison are represented by Galeria Vera Cortes, Lisbon; Von Bartha Garage, Basel and Studio Trisorio, Naples.