Steven shearer interview

Steven Shearer (born 1968) is a contemporary artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia, part of the photoconceptualism scene of the Vancouver School.

Work

Shearer attended Emily Carr University in Vancouver, and then painted work which combined text and geometry.^[1] After 1996, he returned to figurative art in his paintings and other work, focusing on youth, alienation, aggression, melancholy, and heavy metal.^[1][2] Critics speak of his sources in his painting and drawings being artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec or Edvard Munch.^[3] His drawings in particular examine what has been called a sub-culture and some themes of victimization.^[4] In Artforum in 2005, Matthew Higgs affectionately called Shearer the "bastard offspring of the Photo-conceptualists."^[5] As one critic wrote:

Shearer's subject matter centres on youth, alienation and barely repressed violence. It is a world inhabited by death-metal rockers, 1970s prefab boy bands and teen stars, glam-rockers and guitar-wielding t

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Steven Shearer

Canadian artist Steven Shearer (b. 1968) has developed a painting practice that weds canonical art history to the contemporary moment, specifically its more plebeian or subterranean expressions. His work, which also includes drawing, assemblage, sculpture, and installation, deploys a wide range of references as well as a vast archive of historical and contemporary found images.

Shearer was born in New Westminster, Canada, and earned his BFA in 1992 from the Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver, where he continues to live and work.

The artist’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide. A solo presentation of Shearer’s work, Sleep, Death’s Own Brother, was on view at The George Economou Collection, Athens, in 2024. The exhibition coincided with the release of a major monograph on the artist’s work, Steven Shearer: Working from Life, which was published by DCV with an essay by Dieter Roelstraete.

In 2016, the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, hosted a retrospective that includ

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Interview with Steven Shearer

Canada’s representative at the 54^th Venice Beinnale is Steven Shearer, a soft-spoken and mild-mannered Vancouver-based artist whose work delves deep into the seldom excavated, often explosive interior lives of teenaged boys.

 

Garage bands, long hair and grunge style are of particular interest to Shearer because they are emblematic of his suburban youth. It’s a subculture defined by anger and rebellion, as Shearer’s series of Poems attest to. These graphic, black and white text works are mash-ups inspired by the grotesque lyrics of heavy metal songs. The dramatic, billboard-sized Poem installed outside the Canada pavilion begins: “triumphant secretions / sculpted in foul mist / dehydrated spectral birth / at war with false metal…” Shearer’s obvious reverence for the rude and vulgar language of metal music draws attention to its poetry, and in turn speaks to the entire aim of Shearer’s project, which is to reveal the insecurities and vulnerabilities behind the walls erected by adolescents. The pavilion’s interior sho