Many of these works are thick with references. It’s a triptych, and the central image – the Post-it part – is a drawing Shearer made and then photographed. Not assertive in the first way you might think of the term, but assertive as if this thing was trying to work up the courage to assert itself.īat Post-it Statue, 2012, is a rare work in which Shearer himself took the photos. Shier used the term “assertive,” and that was how it felt to me. He has added a soundtrack that gives the work anthropomorphic qualities: hissing, humming and grunting, almost as if it’s getting up the energy to do something. The other dominant work in the space is Geometric Mechanotherapy Cell for Harmonic Alignment of Movements and Relations, 2007-08, a monumental motorized sculpture in which Shearer has reproduced a play structure he found in a photograph.
#Death metal font free series#
The first is Sideshow Rigmarole, 2020, a sprawling series of 33 found images in various hues mounted on rag paper – men, boys, dogs, would-be rock ‘n’ roll stars posing for what we imagine to be 1960s album covers. Upstairs, the show’s main gallery is dominated by two works. The title, when I checked for it, seemed apt: Hellspawn, 1999. Black bug-like creatures on a grid of pale yellow loomed over me, one of several Shearer works installed here. This is one of the central themes of the show.įrom the lobby, with its view of the ocean – sparkling on Wednesday morning – I moved up the stairs to the exhibition, and my attention was diverted. “Photography has informed his thinking and practice, right from the get-go,” Shier says.
#Death metal font free archive#
While his body of work is diverse – sculpture, collage, drawing, painting – this vast digital archive is the consistent starting point. Courtesy of Galerie Eva Presenhuber, and David Zwirner Galleryįor more than two decades, Shearer has collected some 78,000 images from the Internet and organized them in groups: metalheads, mullets, the 1970s teen heartthrob Leif Garrett.
So the Polygon show is a rare opportunity to be immersed in Shearer’s work here at home.
More recently, during this spring’s Capture Photography Festival, a series of billboards by Shearer featuring images of people sleeping were almost immediately covered over after complaints. It was curated by Reid Shier, now director of the Polygon. In Vancouver, there was a Contemporary Art Gallery show that opened in late 2004, and before that, in 2000, a show at the Or Gallery, an artist-run centre. In Canada, he had a major survey at the Power Plant in Toronto that opened in late 2007. Shearer is from Metro Vancouver and still lives and works here. On Saturday, the Polygon opens Steven Shearer, the first solo exhibition for the internationally renowned artist on home turf in years. Entering the glassed-in lobby, it was impossible to ignore the gallery’s location: right on the Burrard Inlet. The Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver felt like a million miles away from it all, although the catastrophe was just down the road. Wrong? People were still missing, thousands of animals were dead or dying, infrastructure had crumbled and the supply chain was in trouble. With what was happening in this province – deadly flooding and mudslides – going to look at art felt incongruous, at the very least. I wasn’t really in the mood, to be honest.