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Steven Shearer at De Appel Foundation - Thursday, March 22, 2007, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Martin Aas visiting a 'one-artist show' by Steven Shearer at the
De Appel Foundation
in Amsterdam. Shearer is a product of the leading, internationally renowned art scene that flourishes in the West-Canadian harbour town of Vancouver that since the middle of the 1980's enjoys worldwide attention as a major epicentre for contemporary photo-, film- and video art.
In this context, Shearer's prevailing passionate devotion to more "traditional" practices like drawing and painting (graphic art, oil on canvas, silkscreen, lithographs etc.) is all the more extraordinary. Shearer generally derives the motifs for many of his colourful, figurative canvases from the obscure, suburban subculture of the American heavy metal scene and its various (Scandinavian) offshoots, or from the innocent schmaltz of 1970's forgotten pop idols.
Steven Shearer at De Appel Foundation in Amsterdam
Shearer's outlook reveals a strong personal (and inevitably also autobiographical) tinted sympathy for these quintessentially proletarian non-cultures. Simultaneously his work is characterized by the cool anthropological detachment of an almost "scientific" eye. Steven Shearer's paintings do not shy away from hallowed traditions. Despite the often jesting, blasphemous nature of their visual source material, the paintings enter into a historic dialogue with the titans of European painting, from Bosch and Breughel to Bonnard and Norwegian
Edvard Munch
- all of them undisputed masters of the melancholic, the gothic spirit of life - both obscene and grotesque.
Steven Shearer was born in 1968 in New Westminster, Canada. At the moment he is based in Vancouver.
The work of Steven Shearer borders between an anthropological approach and a recount of personal history. He gravitates around youth culture phenomena and the aesthetic of personal photographs posted on the Internet. He has focused his attention on amateur musicians, fanzines, and snapshots that he collects and archives from the Internet. Through different steps of removal, Shearer’s systematizing of these archives evolves into a form in itself. Moving between installations, drawings, sculpture, painting, and inkjet prints, elements of his collection are isolated into autonomous objects, only to generate new anthologies.
Steven Shearer at De Appel Foundation in Amsterdam
In Shed, 2005, a version of Shearer’s 2002 work reproduced for Downtime: Constructing Leisure, a prefabricated garden toolshed stands as a suburban refuge for an unseen adolescent. Every hour, for a one-minute interval, an electric guitar solo plays extremely loudly, sonically invading the gallery space; for the remaining time the shed is lit up from inside, suggesting a presence. The work functions as an homage to unrealized youthful dreams of fame and glory, reminiscent of hundreds of forever-unknown garage bands’ intense practice hours.
Shearer received a BFA from Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada, in 1993. His work has been presented in solo shows such as The Draw, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2005, and at Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, 2003; American Fine Arts Co., New York, 2002; and Mars Gallery, Tokyo, 2002. He has been part of group shows such as Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, 2004; I See a Darkness, Blum & Poe, Santa Monica, 2002; and East International, Norwich Gallery, Norwich, England, 1999.
Martin Aas and Carlos Fernandes at the Steven Shearer exhibition
The Renaissance Society’s harshly angled, highly vaulted architecture functions as the stage for exposing the latent Gothic impulse in contemporary America. The works reflect on mysticism, anger, mourning, horror, aggression, angst, apocalypse and the post-human in the forms of text on walls, drawings, sculpture, and video. Poems are derived from Goth Metal song titles (Steven Shearer); blood-colored candle wax drippings ooze and spill from the mouth of a stone grotto (Tony Tasset); a psychedelic meditation on frontier violence depicts haunted mansions and abandoned movie theaters (Jeremy Blake); a body-based cosmogony obsessively repeats tooth, bone, muscle, and hair (Kacy Maddux); a stained dropped ceiling is simultaneously repulsive, beautiful, and horrific (Jay Heikes); a dual homage to the films Invocation of My Demon Brother and Carrie is also a paean to Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction (Ellen Cantor), a rant calls for a new era ruled by a chaos called the Amorphous Law (Sterling Ruby), and a scene of instinctive aggression is ritually played out in the animal kingdom, (John Espinosa).
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