Born 1968
Lives Vancouver
Sleeper
2008
Photolaminate, acrylic on canvas
137x128cm
Courtesy the artist
With the obsessive enthusiasm of a teenage rock and roll fan Steven Shearer cuts and pastes found images culled from his personal archive of over 36,000 jpegs into assemblages according to his own invented typologies, including ‘First Band’, ‘Child Actors’ and ‘Mullets’. His series of ‘Poems’ (2006) comprises posters containing real and invented black metal lyrics such as ‘lugubrious befoulment’ or ‘abhorrent putrilage’, which he diligently reproduces by hand, like a kid drawing copies of his favourite album covers. For Shearer the rock aesthetic is an influential brand of folk art that thrives in the middle-class suburbia in which he grew up. (CL)
