Name: Steven Shearer
Start: 2024-2-22
Location: David Zwirner

“My image archive stems from an almost forensic interest in how images are made, how they’re formed both physically and theoretically. I’m interested in making things that explore how we all remember and idealize each other. Today’s images are echoes of how people have always been depicted, throughout history.”

—Steven Shearer

Installation view, Steven Shearer: Profaned Travelers, David Zwirner, New York, 2024

In this ongoing body of work, Shearer sources digital images, largely dating from the late 1990s and early 2000s, found online. The exhibition develops and diversifies the subject of sleep and its associations—death among them—in Shearer’s practice, and likewise ponders the power of photographic images and their circulation to unsettle established notions of presentation and propriety.

Steven Shearer, Profaned Traveler, 2024

The name of the exhibition is derived from the title of a featured work, Profaned Traveler, which pictures the head of a sleeping man being crudely prodded by hands that enter from outside of the frame. Harnessing multiple symbolic meanings while alluding to the image’s content and religious iconography, the title evokes the disturbance of the sacred, the passage of life and death, and disembodiment and the dream world.

Steven Shearer, Woman on Bench, 2024

A number of the images on view were first shown in Vancouver’s Capture Photography Festival in 2021 as public-facing billboards. However, the project was censored shortly after its debut following complaints from the public, who were unnerved by the nuanced boundaries between sleep and death explored in the series of outdoor images.

Installation view of Steven Shearer’s Untitled (2020), on view in Capture Photography Festival, Vancouver, 2021. Photo by Dennis Ha

“If you're familiar with Steven Shearer's work, it is not hard to find works that play with this disorienting ambiguity: his work is full of the living dead, so to speak, of chimeras and specters, revenants and zombies.”

—Dieter Roelstraete, curator, Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago

Installation view, Steven Shearer: Profaned Travelers, David Zwirner, New York, 2024

The images are enlarged to spread across the expanse of the wall, as if filling the apse of a cathedral; they appear hallowed, almost ecclesiastical—monumental to a degree that they might inspire awe or facilitate encounters with the divine—but likewise radiate the cool flush of contemporary digital imaging. In Teresa’s Trip, the head of someone asleep is covered in a kind of shroud. Their face tilts upward almost ecstatically, like a pietà catching rays of celestial light.

Steven Shearer, Teresa's Trip, 2024

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 1647–1652 (detail), Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome

“His manipulation of proportions and physiognomies certainly owes something to mannerism, … his love of stylized portraits in profiles … also harks back to those of Sandro Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, and Antonio del Pollaiuolo.… In many ways, Shearer’s overarching project represents a double cultural archaeology: one of palimpsests of the near present and a more remote past.”

—Nicholas Cullinan, director, National Portrait Gallery, London

Steven Shearer, On Grass, 2024

Installation view, Steven Shearer: Profaned Travelers, David Zwirner, New York, 2024

“There was something candid about the images of sleeping bodies. Many were not found asleep in bed but in public places or situations that left them propped up and kind of mannered while lost in sleep. It created all these kinds of figures that looked like they could be in a religious painting.”

—Steven Shearer

Anthony van Dyck, Venetia, Lady Digby, on her Deathbed, 1633 (detail). Collection of Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781 (detail). Collection of Detroit Institute of Arts

Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 1799 (detail). Collection of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Frederic Leighton, Flaming June, 1895 (detail). Collection of Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico

Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, c. 1508–1510. Collection of Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

The theme of sleep has been a throughline in Shearer’s work since he began collecting relevant images in the early 2000s. Using various search terms in numerous languages and configurations, the artist amassed thousands of sleep-related images for figure studies and elements for larger groupings, in works like Sleep II.

Steven Shearer, Sleep II, 2015. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario

Steven Shearer, Sleep II, 2015 (detail). Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario

“A large part of Shearer’s project, it would seem, is to … build an archive of alternative knowledge and counter-memory that not only can be collected, clipped, organized, and classified but also re-photographed, recombined, re-contextualized, re-figured, re-imagined and transformed through the poetics of his work into art, however rarified art might still be.”

—Nancy Tousley, critic and curator

Steven Shearer, Archive Volumes, 2010-ongoing, artist books, 19 volumes, dimensions variable

The resulting works in this exhibition are a constellation of self-referential gestures that hark back to Shearer’s extensive archive and his own exhibition history.

Steven Shearer, From A Collection of 27 Drawings, 2009-2011

Steven Shearer, Napper, 2019

Steven Shearer, Untitled, 2010

Steven Shearer, From Untitled Drawings, 2008

Installation view, Steven Shearer: Profaned Travelers, David Zwirner, New York, 2024

"In death, as in life, our bodies can demean and degrade us, Shearer seems to suggest, but that’s no excuse to look away."

—Chloe Stead, Frieze

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