Jerry Pethick

A solo exhibition of work from the estate of Jerry Pethick will take place at Catriona Jeffries, 12 September – 11 October, 2008.


A visual and textual chronicle of the production of Jerry Pethick's Time Top is now available.

Catriona Jeffries gallery is very pleased to announce the installation in Vancouver of Time Top by Jerry Pethick. After being submerged for over two years in the Pacific Ocean off the coastal shores of Gibsons, north of Vancouver, Time Top has been installed on the north shore of False Creek just west of the Cambie Bridge.

Pethick's Time Top alludes to an imaginary time and space vehicle that appeared in Clarence Gray and William Pitt's lively science-fiction comic strip, "Brick Bradford," in 1935. The artist, who read the comic strip as a child, saw the Time Top as a "short-lived imaginative threshold which allowed free access to the past and future, not as intergalactic travel but as one of our own world at different times ... a symbol of intelligent technology, an imaginary device inducing wonderment." The comic's last installment left the Time Top decelerating over the Pacific and revolving at terrific speed. Five decades later, Pethick's sculpture readdresses the potential for a relic or enigmatic object to move sideways through epistemologies and stir up fresh perceptions.

Commissioned by Concord Pacific Group Inc. through the City of Vancouver Public Art Program, Jerry Pethick's Time Top was cast and fabricated in bronze by the Harman Foundry in Sechelt, B.C. Then, fitted with an electrical umbilical delivering a low-voltage positive charge to the structure, it was transported to Gibsons Marina to be immersed in sea water for two years in order to accumulate a deposit of minerals and small barnacle-like sea creatures. Formally known as "Electro-deposition of Minerals in Sea Water," this accretion technology has been developed since 1974 by architect and marine scientist, Prof. Wolf H. Hilbertz, and coral ecologist, Dr. Thomas J. Goreau. When the Time Top's accretion process was complete, the encrusted bronze was hoisted from the ocean, placed on a barge and floated down to the intertidal shoal on False Creek's north side. A series of granite cap stones installed on the facing sea wall function like historical petroglyphs, inscribed with images and text from the original comic strip.

Time Top was Jerry Pethick's last major work prior to his death in 2003. The work was formally launched on October 5, 2006.