Steven Shearer Solo Exhibition at the Brandt Foundation

The Brant Foundation Art Study Center is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works by Steven Shearer. The exhibition, which spans Steven Shearer’s prolific 20-year career working in a variety of media, brings together paintings, drawings, collages and poems to demonstrate the constantly evolving nature of the artist’s practice. Shearer’s work draws upon a visual lexicon of portraiture and representation of the body, often using found imagery that he collects and archives as source material. Through this process, contemporary imagery is distilled into the tradition of portraiture revealing affinities between various modes of figuration throughout history to the present.

Shearer consistently returns to the found imagery he collects to use as the subject matter of his collage works, which incorporate images lifted from various fan magazines as well as from the web. These references often reflect not only his own personal experience of growing up in the suburbs of Vancouver, but also a collective memory of the visual and verbal landscape of suburban and teenage alienation.

The subject of Shearer’s collage works have ranged from metalheads to teen heartthrobs to prefabricated toolsheds. Three collage works will be in view, including Sleep II (2015), a large-scale triptych made up of found photographs of people asleep. Expressions of torment or ecstasy can be found in the manner of their sleeping bodies and faces, resembling those represented in religious paintings from the past. The historical tradition of statuary is evoked via found images of Leif Garrett in Bad Cast (2001), while Scrap #2 (2003), is composed of 132 works on paper ranging from original drawings to found printed material.

Learn more at the Brandt Foundation.