Scott Watson (Canadian, b. 1950) is Director Emeritus and Research Fellow at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia. A curator whose career has spanned more than thirty-five years, Watson is internationally recognized for his research and work in curatorial and exhibition studies, contemporary art and issues, and art theory and criticism. His distinctions include the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2010); the Alvin Balkind Award for Creative Curatorship in BC Arts (2008) and the UBC Dorothy Somerset Award for Performance Development in the Visual and Performing Arts (2005). Watson has published extensively in the areas of contemporary Canadian and international art. His 1990 monograph on Jack Shadbolt earned the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 1991. Recent publications include Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry (2015); Thrown: British Columbia’s Apprentices of Bernard Leach and their Contemporaries (2011), a finalist for the 2012 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize; “Race, Wilderness, Territory and the Origins of the Modern Canadian Landscape” and “Disfigured Nature” (in Beyond Wilderness, McGill University Press, 2007); and “Transmission Difficulties: Vancouver Painting in the 1960s” (in Paint, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2006).
The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is home to one of the largest public collections of art in British Columbia. During the past few years, the collection’s reputation has gained increased attention through the acquisition of important works by artists of regional, national and international origin. Recent Acquisitions offers an opportunity to see a number of works that have recently entered the collection.
The exhibition will highlight major works both inside and outside the Gallery. Inside features works by Stephen Andrews, Jerry Pethick, Steven Shearer, Myfanwy MacLeod, Ray Johnson and Peter Schuyff. Stephen Andrews’ Untitled: The End, 1st Part of the 2nd half, “The Future” is a large-scale installation of sixty-three vertical mylar “filmstrips” that demonstrate the beginning of his interest in blending portraiture and cinema. Jerry Pethick is represented by three important pieces that employ his early attempts to successfully realize Gabriel Lippman’s fly’s-eye view in photographic form. Steven Shearer, one of this year’s winners of the annual VIVA awards, is represented by Scrap, a multi-part collection of drawings, prints, collages and photographs that proposes a social typology of suburban youth culture and modern design in the mid-1970s. Myfanwy MacLeod’s Wood for the People consists of identical cast concrete logs blocking one of the entryways to the gallery—a rural woodpile displaced in an urban environment. A 1965 monochrome painting by New York-based artist Ray Johnson will be exhibited with a selection of correspondences with artist Peter Schuyff. Ball Roy, a painting by Schuyff that references Vancouver’s PUMPS scene, will be exhibited in proximity to the Johnson work.
Recent Acquisitions invite, front.
Artwork by Steven Andrews.
Stephen Shearer, Scrap I, 2001. Mixed media, dimensions variable (installation view).
Scott Watson (Canadian, b. 1950) is Director Emeritus and Research Fellow at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia. A curator whose career has spanned more than thirty-five years, Watson is internationally recognized for his research and work in curatorial and exhibition studies, contemporary art and issues, and art theory and criticism. His distinctions include the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2010); the Alvin Balkind Award for Creative Curatorship in BC Arts (2008) and the UBC Dorothy Somerset Award for Performance Development in the Visual and Performing Arts (2005). Watson has published extensively in the areas of contemporary Canadian and international art. His 1990 monograph on Jack Shadbolt earned the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 1991. Recent publications include Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry (2015); Thrown: British Columbia’s Apprentices of Bernard Leach and their Contemporaries (2011), a finalist for the 2012 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize; “Race, Wilderness, Territory and the Origins of the Modern Canadian Landscape” and “Disfigured Nature” (in Beyond Wilderness, McGill University Press, 2007); and “Transmission Difficulties: Vancouver Painting in the 1960s” (in Paint, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2006).