Jerry Pethick (Canadian, 1935-2003) was a visual artist who bridged artistic and scientific fields through an immersive study of optics and perception. Pethick’s lifelong interest in technology and the possibilities of visual perception led to experiments with unconventional materials in his art practice such as plastics and lenticular lenses. A key strategy in his experimentation was obscuring perspective, either through lenses or sculptural assemblages, which was reflective of his critique of modernism and linear progress. Pethick’s work gained popularity during the 1960s and 1970s, as it aligned with many counterculture concepts including alternative experiences of reality, op-art and mysticism. A graduate of Chelsea Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art in London, UK, Pethick’s work has been exhibited internationally, including shows at the Vancouver Art Gallery (1979, 1984), the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (1989), Centre International d’Art Contemporain Montréal (1992) and the Toronto Sculpture Garden (1993). A major survey of his work was exhibited posthumously at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2015.

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).