Polygon presents a rare Steven Shearer show on his home turf

I wasn’t actually within the temper, to be sincere. With what was occurring on this province – lethal flooding and mudslides – going to have a look at artwork felt incongruous, on the very least. Bizarre. Fallacious? Individuals have been nonetheless lacking, 1000’s of animals have been useless or dying, infrastructure had crumbled and the provision chain was in bother.

The Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver felt like a million miles away from all of it, though the disaster was simply down the street. Coming into the glassed-in foyer, it was unattainable to disregard the gallery’s location: proper on the Burrard Inlet. On the water.

On Saturday, the Polygon opens Steven Shearer, the primary solo exhibition for the internationally famend artist on home turf in years. Shearer is from Metro Vancouver and nonetheless lives and works right here. In Canada, he had a main survey on the Energy Plant in Toronto that opened in late 2007. In Vancouver, there was a Modern Artwork Gallery show that opened in late 2004, and earlier than that, in 2000, a show on the Or Gallery, an artist-run centre. It was curated by Reid Shier, now director of the Polygon.

Extra not too long ago, throughout this spring’s Seize Images Competition, a collection of billboards by Shearer that includes photographs of individuals sleeping have been nearly instantly covered over after complaints.

So the Polygon show is a rare alternative to be immersed in Shearer’s work right here at home.

For greater than 20 years, Shearer has collected some 78,000 photographs from the Web and arranged them in teams: metalheads, mullets, the Nineteen Seventies teen heartthrob Leif Garrett. Whereas his physique of labor is numerous – sculpture, collage, drawing, portray – this huge digital archive is the constant place to begin.

“Images has knowledgeable his pondering and apply, proper from the get-go,” Shier says. This is likely one of the central themes of the show.

From the foyer, with its view of the ocean – glowing on Wednesday morning – I moved up the steps to the exhibition, and my consideration was diverted. Black bug-like creatures on a grid of pale yellow loomed over me, certainly one of a number of Shearer works put in right here. The title, once I checked for it, appeared apt: Hellspawn, 1999.

Upstairs, the show’s most important gallery is dominated by two works. The primary is Sideshow Rigmarole, 2020, a sprawling collection of 33 discovered photographs in varied hues mounted on rag paper – males, boys, canine, would-be rock ‘n’ roll stars posing for what we think about to be Sixties album covers. Shier calls them photo-laminates.

The opposite dominant work within the house is Geometric Mechanotherapy Cell for Harmonic Alignment of Actions and Relations, 2007-08, a monumental motorized sculpture through which Shearer has reproduced a play construction he present in a {photograph}. He has added a soundtrack that offers the work anthropomorphic qualities: hissing, buzzing and grunting, nearly as if it’s getting up the power to do one thing. Shier used the time period “assertive,” and that was the way it felt to me. Not assertive within the first approach you may consider the time period, however assertive as if this factor was making an attempt to work up the braveness to say itself.

Bat Publish-it Statue, 2012, is a rare work through which Shearer himself took the photographs. It’s a triptych, and the central picture – the Publish-it half – is a drawing Shearer made after which photographed.

Many of those works are thick with references. Xmas Bushes, 2005, a grid of discovered photographs of Christmas bushes, the pictures all upside-down, brings to thoughts Vancouver artist Rodney Graham’s inverted bushes. The portray Younger Symbolist, 2013, subtly exhibits off Shearer’s data of artwork historical past, his virtuosity as a painter, and his curiosity in mixing types – modern and historic – in addition to his playfulness.

The Polygon is a non-collecting establishment that focuses on pictures, and I’m unsure I’ve ever seen a portray put in within the house. Maybe that’s why it was the work on this show that actually stood out for me: from Shearer’s tiny Clifford, 2014 – through which Eighties metalhead meets Rembrandt – to the symbolism-heavy The Collector’s Go to, 2019, to the newest work within the show, Potter, 2021.

Potter appears like a true pandemic portray: a long-haired, shirtless man works with clay with nice depth, surrounded by accomplished pots. However wait – are they vases or check tubes? A few them could also be holding intestines – or perhaps it’s simply the design on the outer layer. Every little thing feels ambivalently inside-out, together with the potter himself, whose skeleton appears nearly seen with a purple hearth mirrored in his chest. He wears smooth pants, maybe pyjama bottoms. The completed works on the cabinets behind him are laborious. The work he’s creating is in its in-between state. (The portray is on mortgage from the gathering of Greek delivery tycoon George Economou.)

Within the Polygon’s small again gallery, there are a few extra works, together with a copper mannequin for the large sculpture; a number of sure books of Shearer’s collected photographs are displayed beneath Plexiglas.

This gallery options a giant wall of home windows, opening as much as the water. As I walked in, it occurred to me that, for a jiffy, I had been sidetracked from the horrible information of the day amid Shearer’s work.

Taking a look at artwork is rarely a dangerous thought.

On the way in which out, I ended on the touchdown for one more second to commune with Hellspawn, then descended again into the true world.