Jerry Pethick: Shooting the Sun/Splitting the Pie

Over the course of a career that spanned four decades, the Hornby Island-based artist Jerry Pethick produced a complex and fascinating body of work that is difficult to classify. Focusing on questions of perception and knowledge, as well as revolutionary moments from the history of Modernism, Pethick engaged in a life-long pursuit of a sculptural idiom grounded in virtual space and transparency. While he drew upon a sophisticated understanding of science, optics and art history, his work was constructed from modest objects and materials retrieved from the Hornby Island Recycling Depot or purchased at an ordinary hardware store.

Pethick first became known for his pioneering work with holography during the late 1960s and early 70s. Though he stopped making holograms when he moved to Hornby Island in the mid-1970s, the nature of visual perception remained central to his work. His wide-ranging investigations culminated in the large-scale photographic arrays and playful sculptures of the 1990s and early 2000s, in which hundreds of snapshots made at a given location are viewed through a grid of Fresnel lenses so that they form a single three dimensional image that hovers in virtual space.