Announcing the installation of Time Top by Jerry Pethick
TOP
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.
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 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.
major work prior to his death in 2003. The work will be formally launched
on October 5, 2006.
