SHOOTING THE SUN/SPLITTING THE PIE

Jerry Pethick

Central Gallery
July 2 to September 10, 2016

Curated by Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art, Vancouver Art Gallery

Over the course of a career that spanned almost five decades, Jerry Pethick (1935–2003) produced a complex and multifaceted body of work that is difficult to classify. For much of this time he focused on the way in which models of observation – including linear perspective and cultural memory – shape our understanding of the world and our place in it. Through an extended emphasis on an object’s entanglement with its surroundings and the viewer’s consciousness, Pethick challenged culturally determined ways of perceiving space and the related separation of observer and object that has occupied a central position in Western thought since the 18th century.