
Exhibition catalogue from Return to Brutopia: Eric Metcalfe, Works and Collaborations at the UBC Fine Arts Gallery (11 September—17 October 1992) with texts by Scott Watson and Peggy Gale.
Exhibition catalogue from Return to Brutopia: Eric Metcalfe, Works and Collaborations at the UBC Fine Arts Gallery (11 September—17 October 1992) with texts by Scott Watson and Peggy Gale.
Eric Metcalfe (Canadian, b. 1940) is a visual and performance artist known for his affiliation with the Fluxus art movement. Metcalfe’s interdisciplinary practice encompasses painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, printmaking, performance, video and film. Born in Vancouver, Metcalfe’s lifelong passions of art, jazz, drawing and printmaking began while attending St. Michael’s University School in Victoria, and he went on to pursue a BFA from the University of Victoria in 1963. Metcalfe met artist Kate Craig in 1967. Together, they assumed the personas of Dr. Brute and Lady Brute and became involved in mail art networks, including Image Bank, International Image Exchange Directory and the first International Satellite Exchange Directory. Alongside his involvement in Image Bank, Metcalfe was a co-founder of the Vancouver artist-run centre Western Front along with Martin Bartlett, Kate Craig, Henry Greenhow, Glenn Lewis, Michael Morris, Vincent Trasov and Mo Van Nostrand, where he continues to be a member. Metcalfe has received numerous awards and recognition for his work, including the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award (2000), the Audain Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award (2006), the Governor General’s Award (2008) and an Honorary Doctorate from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2015). His work has been exhibited widely in both Canada and abroad, including at the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art (New York).
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).