SANTA BARBARA, CA.- The University Art Museum debuts 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 fo