Steven Shearer: ‘I started to think of the internet as a kind of sarcophagus’ – The Art Newspaper

The Canadian artist Steven Shearer often employs stylistic references from art history—from Symbolism to German Romanticism—in his portraits of figures from music subcultures. His metalheads and punks form an ongoing exploration of contemporary forms of white masculinity. He has also worked with text pieces, notably when representing Canada at the Venice Biennale in 2011, as well as found imagery, such as Sleep II (2015), a colossal collage of thousands of images, all sourced online, of people asleep. In recent years he has returned to the theme of sleep in works presented on billboards and in galleries.

Although not paintings, these enormously enlarged images convey a painterly feel, and Shearer is especially attentive to the ways in which they relate to art history and themes of religious figuration. This spring, he premiers a new selection of enlarged images of snoozing people in The Golden Recline at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich.

The Art Newspaper: I always saw you primarily as a painter. Can you explain the relationship between the photographic images and the paintings?

Steven Shearer: I never take photos. I never had that impulse. For me it’s more about all the pictures that exist out there, especially on the internet. The fact that they are anonymous and somehow unselfconscious, yet distributed worldwide, attracts me. There is something poetic about that. I started collecting images as reference material for paintings and at some point this activity became meaningful in itself. I looked for ways to give the archives some presentable forms.

You sometimes include these archive works in painting exhibitions. But in Profaned Travelers, your recent exhibition at David Zwirner in New York, there were no traditional paintings, right?

That is correct. Only enlarged photographic images on canvas. All showing people asleep.

What attracted you to the theme?

What made sleep attractive as a subject was its universality. It makes these works very different from most of my other works based on found images that have a much more specific focus, like Swedish or Norwegian music from a certain period. Sleep is the opposite to that. I downloaded these images 15 years ago and one of the criteria for selecting them this time was reverse searching for them. These are all images that can no longer be easily found, if at all. It would appear that they are no longer existent. I started to think of the internet as a kind of sarcophagus. The images seem to be completely buried. They are dormant, dead or disembodied.

Why do you think they exist in the first place?

For personal reasons, I guess. And then there was the novelty of being able to share images with people online without realising that it would be disseminated around the world.

Would you say some of the figures appear dead?

I’m aware some of the images have a deathly aspect to them, but to be honest, I don’t think I would have been able to spend so much time piecing these works together if that would be the focus. The images I singled out, thinking that they would work on this larger scale, seem to me to embody life and perhaps memory. This is not a morbid pursuit.

Are you interested that these people might be dreaming, perhaps inhabiting other worlds?

Well, where is that person when they’re in front of us but not present? The vulnerability and unselfconsciousness of the subject is, I think, what these works really are about. But the vulnerability is sort of overcome by the scale. The strength of them has to do with the scale and the sequence of going from one to the next. Being in a room confronted by them, going from one to another, that’s the point.

They do not really appear to be photographs—they feel like paintings.

If I didn’t approach these pictures from a painter’s perspective, I would not have an idea of how to arrive at these results. Painting—and perhaps one could say the history of painting—provides the toolkit for me.

What do you pay attention to when creating them?

The main thing was how to deal with empty space and how to handle the noise, areas where you can suggest more details and others where you can keep the eye circulating. I had to do subtle adjustments to the composition and the colours.

Are you actively highlighting formal aspects and painterly qualities that somehow make the viewer think of historical works?

Yes. The first cue that came up when I looked at these “enlarged sleeps” was the echo of religious figuration. With my contemporary paintings and my references to popular culture, I have always been drawn to things that resonate with this art historical feeling, whether it’s portraiture types, almost like a phrenological frame, or the mannerism that some musicians are taking on when they are making pictures of themselves, echoing German Romanticism or Actionist expressions of body manipulation and degradation.

What do these historical references add?

If I can make the paintings echo bodies and portraits from the past, it’s a powerful thing. It brings these ghosts into the paintings. Once I found the themes of religious figuration, I was convinced that sleep is an important subject. And it’s a shared experience.

And now you are opening The Golden Recline, a second exhibition around that universal theme. Have some of these been displayed before?

No, not as these individual enlargements. It’s all new. Each image in the show is unique, not editioned. Usually when I make a print work it would be an edition of three but these are singular. It’s how they are individual and how they relate to painting that interests me, as opposed to the multitude of images in the archive works.

And how do they differ from the last show thematically?

These compositions are more chaotic. The figures are more thrown off balance in them. And there is perhaps more of a Surrealist absurdity to some of them. I guess that’s why I felt I could do another show, it will have a very different feel. Maybe this new selection is more pedestrian, the images are less arty. In a way, it’s a bit of a return to my sleep archive as a sort of anthropological study. The images are more set in place: carpet, leather couch, a car, being drunk, pranks…

Can you explain the enlargement process and how you edit the photographs?

AI and traditional photoshop enlargements were not effective so I had to come up with ways to weave different levels of noise. The enlargement process is somewhere between 7,000% and 12,000%. When blowing something up that much there is more extrapolated information than original information contained in the photo. So some type of digital grain has to fill out all that empty space. That’s where the painterly approach becomes necessary.

In 2015, you created Sleep II, which might be called an atlas of sleep. Does the concept of an atlas have anything to do with art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas?

I normally call these projects archives rather than atlases. But of course, there are inspirations. I could also mention the German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann’s way of working with found imagery.

How did this archival approach actually start?

Realising that there was a huge archive of images of Black Sabbath albums up for sale on eBay was key. I discovered this amateur photo documentation: someone displaying the albums for sale on their bed. The photos also conveyed domestic information on the periphery of the image. Those photos were not directed by any aesthetic pursuit and this unselfconscious form of image-making that takes on a worldwide accessibility really interested me. And it still does.

Those images must have been taken for very specific audiences, very specialised.

Yes, the other archive pieces are about recognisable people from the recent past. They contain more obscure references or subcultures. But for me, on an editorial level, I always imagine someone in the future as the ideal audience. You don’t need to know what any of the people are to engage. And Sleep II was a good way to extend that—it was nice to have something universal that anyone could relate to, now and in the future.

Biography

Born: 1968 New Westminster, Canada

Lives and works: Vancouver

Education: 1991 Alliance of Independent Colleges of Art c/o Nascad New York Summer Studio Programme; 1992 Emily Carr University of Art & Design, Vancouver

Key shows: 2007 De Appel, Amsterdam; 2011 Canada Pavilion, Venice Biennale; 2016 Brant Foundation, Greenwich, Connecticut; 2023 George Economou Collection, Athens; 2024 FLAG Art Foundation, New York

Represented by: Galerie Eva Presenhuber and David Zwirner

• Steven Shearer: The Golden Recline, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, 5 April-16 May