The Apartment
Projects
Uncle Jack, Mom & Steve.
April – June, 2009
The Apartment is thrilled to host “Uncle Jack, Mom & Steve” an exhibition project by Vancouver artist Steven Shearer. For this exhibition Shearer brings together pictures by his mother and uncle, created when they were art students in the early 60s, with his own recent work. Aware of its influences Shearer’s art often draws from archived images, a process essential to his methological sifting through visual culture. Conceived specifically for The Apartment, “Mom, Uncle Jack and Steve” stages an intimate gathering of work to resonate together in this domestic presentation of paintings, drawings and etchings and collage.
Growing up in Port Coquitlam, BC, Steven Shearer lived in a landscape out of time surrounded by wild woods that gave refuse to socializing with local burnouts and rockers. In this landscape void of high culture he was constantly sorting through his visual world. An early collector of stamps, stickers, comics and various bits of junk, Steven would spend hours in his parent’s basement arranging this material for private presentations. It is central to Shearer’s current project to mine these non-art histories and explore counter & sub-culture for reference material and as a passage to older epochs, styles and manners of appearance. The only representations of fine art in this closed suburban landscape were a collection of life drawings by his mother that he glimpsed from time to time on the far wall of her dressing room. At the time he imagined these drawings as long haired male nudes only finding out later that the sketchy subjects were women. Another visual landscape for young Steven was the apartment of his uncle Jack/Jackie whose emotive paintings empathetically modeled the female form. These ambiguous pictures culminated in his imagination to blur with his collected clippings from teen magazines and internet postings. At The Apartment Shearer will bring these early visual influences into direct dialogue with his current work, a figurative project where romantic individuals are entrenched in a sublime wasteland of melancholy. Steven Shearer has exhibited extensively across the world including institutional solo exhibitions at Ikon Gallery, UK, The New Museum, NY and The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada . Steven is represented by Eva Presenhauber, Zurich, Gallerie Franco Noero, Turin, Modern Art Inc., London and Gavin Brown enterprise, NY.
Please join us for an opening reception on Friday April 3 from 8-10pm.
