From the Collection
Eric Metcalfe

October 31, 2008

On Campus News celebrates the University of Saskatchewan art collection. Begun in 1911, the collection comprises more than 4,400 objects, including many important examples from various artists and eras. OCN asked Kent Archer, director of the collection, to select and discuss the works in this series.

Canadian artist Eric Metcalfe donated this Neo Attic to the University of Saskatchewan in June 2007. The piece was created especially for Metcalfe's site-specific mural installation in The Attic Project exhibition, which ran from Nov. 24, 2006 to Feb. 2, 2007 at the University of Saskatchewan's College Building Gallery.

Metcalfe was born in Vancouver in 1940 and obtained an undergraduate degree in 1969 from the University of Victoria. He began his career working in traditional media such as drawing and painting, expanding his oeuvre in 1973 by co-founding the Western Front in Vancouver, an artist-run centre focused on experimental media art. Since the Western Front's inception, he has served in various capacities, as curator of music, exhibitions and performance, while developing his own multi-disciplinary practice that now includes painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, printmaking, performance, video, films and collage.

The nature of his work is often collaborative; he has worked with fellow Western Fronter Hank Bull and with Canadian art collective General Idea. His sources and influences have ranged from jazz and comics to Hollywood film, and he has been closely associated with Fluxus correspondence and conceptual art. In 1969, he created an alter ego, Doctor Brute, who has been a vehicle for much of the work he has made since then. An important figure in Canadian art, Metcalfe is an extremely active participant in Vancouver's art world and one of its principal chroniclers.

Since 1995, Metcalfe has worked with ceramist Gillian McMillan developing various utilitarian objects that range from tea sets to dinner settings, all of which were commissioned pieces. More recently, they collaborated on a series of Greek vessels by the Attic artists of the Archaic phase (5th and 6th century BC). Thematically consistent with his other works, these vessels bear the ever-evolving neo-brute leopard motif. Extending the discourse of art history and contemporary cultural production, these new works challenge the concept of what is considered to be high art or"modern art" versus what is considered craft or merely"decorative art."

Metcalfe paints onto the new reproductions of traditional ancient Greek vases, creating works that conflate the canon of"modernity" with the notion of"decorative" or craft into a hybridized body of work. The resulting travelling exhibition, The Attic Project, thus included this site-specific wall mural, a number of gouache drawings and a silkscreen print.

Over the past four decades, Metcalfe's paintings, sculptures, videotapes and performances have been exhibited both locally and internationally at institutions such as the Vancouver Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Canada, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and at Documenta 8 in Kassel, Germany.

Neo Attic has recently been installed in the Physics Building foyer and will be acknowledged with a dedication ceremony in November.

Artist:	Eric Metcalfe
Title:	Neo Attic
Dimensions:	97.5 x 289 inches
Media:	Acrylic on wood panel
Date:	2007
Credit:	University of Saskatchewan Art Collection, gift of the artist 2007