Steven Shearer: 19/11/04-02/01/05

Steven Shearer
November 19, 2004 – January 2, 2005

Vancouver based artist Steven Shearer has emerged as one of the city’s most well respected young artists. He works in a broad range of disciplines including painting and collage, and continues to investigate the vernacular aesthetics of the 1970s as a site for looking at the emancipatory energies and sometimes revolutionary potential of teens and youth. He has assembled a growing archive of photographs, mostly downloaded from the web, of amateur record and tape collections, guitars and other totems of youthful rebellion and identification. He has also produced a number of works anthologizing images of ‘70s teen pop idols like Shawn Cassidy, whose androgynous sexuality and rapid climb into and then out of the heights of teen fandom is used for its autobiographical metaphors.

The exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery assembled a wide spectrum of Shearer’s recent work with the aim of profiling its many convergent strains. The centerpiece for the show was a recent sculptural installation in the form of a steel garden shed inside of which a guitar P/A system played a heavy metal guitar solo specially commissioned by Shearer. The ‘music’ was amplified and distorted by the metal of the shed, creating a keening shrine to angry, cloistered youth.

Steven Shearer
Vancouver based artist Steven Shearer works in a broad range of disciplines, including painting and collage. He has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally and has recently held solo exhibitions at Colin Deland’s American Fine Arts Co., NYC, Mars Gallery, Tokyo, Blum & Poe, L.A., and Galleria Franco Noero, Torino. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich and Goodwater Gallery, Toronto. Shearer will be exhibiting as part of the group exhibition Pin-Up: Contemporary Collage and Drawing at the Tate Modern, London. Texts on his work have been featured in ARTFORUM, NYC and in catalogue essays such as Rock My World by Ralph Rugoff, San Francisco. Shearer’s work has also been commissioned and appropriated by pop culture mags Arena Homme, Dazed & Confused, photographer Terry Richardson, bands Chicks on Speed, Angelblood and Belgian black metalers Spasm.