Steven Shearer

Steven Shearer is the catalogue for the Vancouver artist's first major touring survey, and it remains a key document of a practice built from the discarded imagery of adolescence and internet subculture.

Organized by the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, where the exhibition opened in 2004 before touring to Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and The Power Plant, Toronto, the show brought together Shearer's photorealistic graphite drawings and paintings alongside his large accumulations of found photographs: long-haired metal fans, skateboarders, and other vernacular self-portraits scavenged from the internet and print ephemera. This edition of the catalogue was published to accompany the Ikon Gallery and Power Plant venues, with essays by Nigel Prince, Helena Reckitt and Nancy Tousley that place Shearer's fascination with teenage male identity, boredom and heavy metal culture within a longer history of appropriation art.

Shearer represented Canada at the 2011 Venice Biennale, and this early survey catalogue documents the vocabulary (collected photographs, hand-lettered poetry, and meticulous drawing) that carried through the rest of his career.