Steven Shearer: Everything and Anything
Steven Shearer is a contemporary artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Born in New Westminster in 1968, he is a graduate of the Emily Carr University of Art and Design.
He has exhibited internationally, at the Tate Modern in London, The New Museum and the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York, and the Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich. In Canada, he has shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. He will represent Canada in Venice in 2011 at the Venice Biennale.
Established in 1895, the Venice Biennale was originally devoted only to the visual arts. It has since expanded its scope to encompass theater, music, dance, film and, more recently, architecture. The Biennale exhibition and National Pavilions are located in the historic Giardini di Castello in Venice.
Shearer is a primarily a multi media artist. He uses photographs, makes installations, as well, he does collages and paints and draws. Themes seen in his work include: youth, alienation, aggression, pop culture and rebellion. Shearer is known for his works exposing the connection between, youth, and the avant-garde. His sculptures, prints, collages, paintings and drawings connect class, gender, and alienation with an element of the absurd.
Shearer's works uses materials from all media that he has collected over the years. He has thousands of digital files. In his work one can see: newspaper clippings, pages torn from magazines, song lyrics, web pages, reproductions, and family snapshots. As he recycles these images, Shearer makes them his own and comments on society through employing them in a collage or painting.
Shearer sometimes uses images of himself in his work. For example, Boy's Life (2004) is a collage that evokes the bedroom wall of a 1970s metal-head, and uses a snapshot of Steven when he was a teenager made up like a member from the iconic rock band Kiss.
Shearer's roots in classic art can be seen in his numerous portraits. Oils paintings and drawings of androgynous long-haired men (such as 1970’s pop idol Leif Garrett) reference Symbolist and Fauvist art and 17th century realism.
Artistic historical references within contemporary social realities of a technologically based world connect to Shearer's artist’s statement: "I am interested in the times I'm living in and in the way the past echoes in them."
Go to theses websites to see more of Steven’s work.
www.marsgallerytokyo.com
http://www.franconoero.com
http://www.presenhuber.com
http://www.gavinbrown.biz/
www.labiennale.org
By Melissa Montgomery
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