Spotlight: Steven Shearer

OCTOBER 30-DECEMBER 19, 2024

The Spotlight series includes a new or never-before-exhibited artwork paired with a commissioned piece of writing, creating focused and thoughtful conversations between the visual arts and authors, critics, poets, scholars, and beyond. In this iteration, the Spotlight features Steven Shearer’s Tin Jobber, 2024. A text by filmmaker and writer Durga Chew-Bose accompanies the presentation.

After-Hours Viewing: Wednesday, November 13, 6-8 PM

THIS PAINTING WAS MADE TO BE LOOKED AT
By Durga Chew-Bose

In the studio, his chair is adjusted to standing height, so even when he’s sitting, he sees as though he might be standing. But is that true? Sitting and standing occupy different categories of seeing. Height is one thing. Posture is another. Slouching might give way to focus. Slouching might suggest that focus has vanished. Standing is active even if you are still. Sitting is sedentary even when you are paying attention (which is, as we know, the opposite of inactivity). Leaning on one leg often makes very plain everything (everything!) that isn’t working. Leaning on one leg can—if you let it—sneak into play a new perspective. Seeing when you are sitting is not the same as seeing when you are standing, but the idea that you might experience the same…tallness, is fun. In his studio, his sitting height is the same as his standing height. Imagine a home where every chair’s sitting height was a person’s standing height. No shift in perspective, just an easing off, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

*

We’re not done with sitting. Or standing. Or chairs. He keeps his chair twenty feet away from his canvas. That’s about two-fifths the length of the Hollywood sign. Or four park benches, or four pool cues, or four office cubicles (an equitable height that provides both privacy and light). That’s two kayaks, two Christmas trees, give or take. That’s four or five swans, depending on the length of their necks. That’s one standard shipping container, which could pack approximately eight hundred flat screen TVs or just over a thousand deck chairs. 

“Twenty feet away” is a good distance for experiencing a painting’s power while also misreading its many details. Both practices are necessary, he says.  The former indicates if the painting has earned our attention. The latter suggests you might be seeing something you are not, an instrument of fantasy, of approximation…of briefly being bound to magic and its hold on our imagination. The former asks: Does it shout? Does it entice with an eerie but familiar invitation? Does it win you over from across the room because there’s green…and then there’s Green?  The latter means you might be mistaking one thing for something else, which is pleasurable, like mishearing the lyrics to a song or getting the wrong idea from a familiar turn of phrase or seeing purple when everyone else sees blue. Feels good to slip up and spot something. Feels good to touch strangeness, double take, experience delay. “I’m drawn to a change of heart,” he says. “I like approaching…from the wrong direction.” In this case, the pupil of the figure is not a pupil but a hole. It mimics a low relief feel, he says. “The magic of painting is how the illusion is created and then at some point, you realize the materiality.” (You realize the decisions.) He continues. “The eye is unlike human anatomy.” From up close, the iris is hollow like a void. From up close, the painting becomes a sculpture.  Rather than reproducing someone who is made of flesh, he says, a figure is made from paint. A figure, in his case, is made from far. From those twenty feet, remember. The painting is a painting is a painting…is the thing the artist wants to get away from, the moment he makes a few marks.

*

He is running away from color. He cites Matisse who said something about beginning with the wrong color. He cites feeling. “There’s an emotional weight to the color rather than a rational motivation for it.” The chromatic design of his figures spring from an internal projection, rising unpredictably like a secret that must be revealed. He claims the palette is metaphoric, more so than anything literal or recognizable, or quick to understand. It’s a muscly palette, potent like a vision. Speculative. The outer limits of grey are made yellow. Orange is a portal elsewhere. Blue solicits states of unrest like seasickness, night chills, seeing someone you’ve long forgotten.

*

Originally, they were going to be cameos, not film cannisters. Originally, they were going to be compressed, low relief artworks. Originally, they were going to be one variety of disc, before they became another variety of disc. Look carefully and you might see more. The saw blade. The flying saucers. The Moon. The moons. The Bowie beauty of it all. And not even those examples, other discs, too. There’s the feeling of orbit, of zodiac, and circuits of ideas, fable-like, turning, turning, turning. There are rings of light, blurred halos that are not explicit. An amalgamation of roundness undergone more so than realized. “Forces at work trying to cancel each other out,” he says, describing the painting’s movement, its platter of ideas. There’s the tiniest sun, behind a snow speak. And pairs of eyes fixed on some horizon (you). Look carefully, and the film cannisters might resemble shields, an extension of the subject’s armor.  “It somehow makes sense,” he says. “But you can’t necessarily pin down why. There’s no direction for interpretation.” These layers of discs, so to speak, are related (he says) to the act of stepping back, to those twenty feet of distance. “Things merge, nothing happens in one go.”

About: 

Steven Shearer (b.1968, New Westminster, Canada) is an artist living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia. Shearer earned his BFA from Emily Carr University of Art & Design, Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1992. Recent solo exhibitions include Profaned Travelers, David Zwirner, New York, NY (2024); Sleep, Death’s Own Brother, The George Economou Collection, Athens, Greece (2023); Working from Life, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, Switzerland (2021); and Steven Shearer, Polygon Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2021); among others. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Death and the Devil: The Fascination with Horror, Hessiches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany (2024); Day for Night: New American Realism (in collaboration with the Aïshti Foudnation), Palazzo Barberini, Rome, Italy (2024);  MELENCOLIA, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, Switzerland (2023); Per Diem Part II: The Gerd Metzdorff Collection, Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver, Canada (2023); Works on Paper: 100 Years, AMANITA, New York, NY (2023); All in one, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, Switzerland (2020); Drawing 2020, Barbara Gladstone, New York, NY (2020); among others.  His work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT; the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; and the George Economou Collection, Athens, Greece; Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; Pinault Colleciton, Paris, France; among others.

Durga Chew-Bose is a Montreal-based writer and filmmaker. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, she later returned to teach a semester course titled “On Not Writing.” She released an essay collection, Too Much and Not the Mood, in 2017 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). In 2024, she made her directorial debut with Bonjour Tristesse, a film adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s classic novel. She was a contributor to Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without Fear (Museum of Modern Art, 2024), Pace Gallery's Agnes Martin monograph, The Distillation of Color (2022),  and Honor Titus (Timothy Taylor Gallery, 2023). Her work has been featured in The Globe and Mail, The New York Time Magazine, David Velasco's Artforum, and The Guardian, among other publications.

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