Steven Shearer

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Steven Shearer, "Sleep II (detail)," 2015

This exhibition marks the first major national survey of the Steven Shearer's work since 2007, when Shearer’s work was last shown in a solo exhibition in the city.

“Steven Shearer is an artist who has received considerable attention internationally, but there have been very few opportunities to see his work locally,” said Reid Shier, director of The Polygon and the curator of the exhibition. “He has developed an iconoclastic practice that deserves to be seen by his hometown Vancouver audiences. We’re thrilled to be able to present a comprehensive look at his recent work, and to have the chance to see how his personal archive of images has helped shape his approach to art making across a range of mediums, including drawing, assemblage, sculpture and painting.”

The exhibition includes more than 70 works by the artist, as well as a 19-volume self-published series of books documenting his vast image archive. The monumental collection features found images from print and online sources, in addition to photographs purchased on eBay. Shearer began the archive after graduating from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 1992. The images from the archive are the genesis of the work on view, including a new, 70-foot-wide installation of 33 prints; collages comprised of thousands of images on canvas; blown-up versions of singular photographs; drawings; paintings; and a towering sculpture made of PVC pipes.

Images will also be installed in the windows of The Polygon from the series that Shearer presented at the Capture Photography Festival this past April, and which were removed following public complaints.

Across his interdisciplinary works, Shearer’s prevailing interest is in exploring the ways people remember and idealize one another. Drawing from historical, modern, and contemporary methods of depiction — from Renaissance and Symbolist paintings to analog photos of long-haired rockers — the artist examines the way images are made and how they constitute meaning, both figuratively and symbolically. The exhibition traces the artist’s many referential layers to their origin point in a still- evolving archive, itself a work to be excavated for hints about the changing ways people are pictured and imagined.

Born in 1968 in New Westminster, Shearer represented Canada at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 and has presented solo shows at the New Museum in New York, de Appel Center for Contemporary Art in Amsterdam, Ikon Gallery in the UK, The Power Plant in Toronto, and Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery and Or Gallery. The artist is represented by Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zürich and David Zwirner Gallery in New York. His work is included in prominent museum and public collections worldwide, among them The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Kunsthaus Zürich.