Harry Wilson
The Death Jump Series: The Blue of Distance
in collaboration with Rob Jones and Cara Berger.
Thursday 22nd August 2013, 12.30pm-4.30pm.
“First there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, and then a deep blue…”
Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams
The Death Jump Series is a project mapping and responding to a series of dangerous jumps from the 20th and 21st century. Drawing on examples ranging from the eccentric early aviation enthusiasts to Felix Baumgartner’s world record freefall from space in 2012 – via Yves Klein and David Bowie – Death Jump hopes to interrogate ideas of failure, the poetics of falling and a contemporary fascination with transcendence and the showman figures that seek it. Performance iterations of The Death Jump Series currently exist as a lecture presentation and a studio piece and have been shown at the Manipulate Festival, Edinburgh and Buzzcut in Glasgow.
The Blue of Distance, is the first incarnation of a durational performance installation that takes two works by Yves Klein as its main starting points; Klein’s Anthropométry performance events from the 1960s in which he conducted naked female models as they covered themselves in paint and made imprints of their bodies onto canvases, and his 1960 photomontage Leap Into the Void which apparently shows him leaping off a wall on a quiet Paris street.
‘A humbling and honest display of humankind’s struggle for transcendence’
Exeunt Magazine on Death Jump at Manipulate
**** ‘Imagination, daring, wit and wonderment all took flight in Harry Wilson’s Death Jump’
The Herald on Death Jump at Buzzcut
www.harryrobertwilson.co.uk
www.deathjump.wordpress.com
Tags: Forest Fringe 13, Performance