Shearer Survey Spans Media

Steven Shearer

At the Contemporary Art Gallery until January 2

In a brief interview with the Straight two years ago, Steven Shearer described himself as an anthropologist of certain cultural forms, forms for which he felt a particular attachment. His protean art ranges across sculpture, sound installation, digital prints, serigraphs, oil and acrylic paintings, and delicately rendered realist drawings, and is derived from his own extensive archive of found imagery, much of it gathered on the Net. Shearer creates critical coherence out of a disparate sampling of youth subcultures and banal suburbanism. This 10-year survey of the Vancouver artist's work pulls together images including a child's messy string collage, death-metal song titles, low-budget fanzine-style collages, fictitious performance posters, prefab tool sheds, pop-culture promo photographs, and snapshots of long-haired white guys partying or playing thrash guitar in their parents' basements.

One of the themes that compels Shearer is the youth culture of the 1970s, especially as manifested in sweet-faced, androgynous teen idols of the Leif Garrett and Shaun Cassidy variety, and in crotch-grabbing, face-painting, blood-dripping heavy-metal bands. The former, this art suggests, represent mainstream society's attempt to promote a clean, compliant, and sexless image of male adolescence, while the latter express all that conventional adults fear of the same demographic: raw aggression, social alienation, and obsessions with sex, death, and violence. His own interest, Shearer says, is in youth as a time when "ideas of identity, social engineering, and culture collide".

Among his principal forms of expression is collage, an example being Boy's Life, a large digital colour print whose title explains its content. Here, hundreds of small found images--from promo shots of the Osmonds, the Partridge Family, and the movie musical Oliver!, to photos of naked hippies, glam rockers, Black Sabbath tapes, drum sets, speakers, owl tattoos, pet opossums, and a crocheted bedspread--are laid out in an approximate grid against a bright, white ground.

A quite different slice of life occurs in Slumber, the most ambitious digital print in the show, in which are collaged many more hundreds of small images, these of people sleeping. Men, teens, children, babies, occasional women--all are caught slumbering in awkward postures and unlikely contexts, on floors, chairs, boats, buses, motorcycles, sidewalks, stairways, and patches of dirt. Curled up like fetuses, seated with heads thrown back, or sprawled with arms outstretched, eyes closed, mouths open, they signal the vulnerable ordinariness of exhausted humanity.

Collage and appropriation enable Shearer to interweave ideas about the social construction of masculinity, the marketplace's construction of celebrity, the history of portraiture, the shifting nature of photographic representation, and--more obscurely--modernism's utopian ideals concerning the creativity of children. Despite the predominance of subjects from the 1970s, he articulates a contemporary condition in which the image bombardment of the mass media--such a rich resource for Andy Warhol four decades ago--finds its present-day electronic equivalent on the Internet, an apparently bottomless well of visual material. Other strategies that Shearer shares with Warhol include the silk-screening of much-enlarged, photo-based images onto canvas and an engagement with banality that transcends the material sourced and sparks a critical dialogue with unregarded aspects of our daily lives.

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