Double Album: Daniel Guzmán Double Album: Steven Shearer double album: daniel guzmán and steven shearer April 23-July 6, 2008 | Second Floor

This exhibition brings together two artists—Daniel Guzmán, born in 1964 in Mexico, and Steven Shearer, born in 1968 in Canada—who use an array of visual mediums to explore the overwhelmingly male world of rock ‘n’ roll and other popular subcultures. Looking at Guzmán’s and Shearer’s work one immediately sees a parallel adoption of 1970s and 1980s pop icons and bands as personal surrogates and avatars of contemporary identity. Both Shearer and Guzmán conjure bodies of work that seem to look outward for their tropes and references, but only as a way for each to look inward at themselves, ultimately creating two divergent oeuvres that each act as extended self-portraits. Following are excerpts from interviews with each artist from the catalogue Double Album: Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer, published by the New Museum. Daniel Guzmán Steven Shearer

Word & Image Options Daniel Guzmán: I started putting texts and words in a series of drawings entitled “carne negra,” Steven Shearer: I grew up in Port Coquitlam, a town forty minutes outside of Vancouver. It seemed which is directly influenced by my reading William Burroughs at the time, mostly photocopied for me to be in a kind of a time warp. I was able to project uncertainty or fear onto physical places excerpts from the book White Subway and some interviews in which he talks about the cut-up and social interaction. PoCo, as people around there call it, was surrounded by forests and bushes technique he learned from his friend Brion Gysin. Burroughs introduced it as a work method, as where I would associate with the local color of burnouts, skids, stoners, and rockers. Out there you a kind of collage using only writing and introducing “chance,” which broke with the traditional could find guns, homemade pornography, blasting caps, needles, and other fun stuff. The Pickton structure of time and space in literature. All that, as well as reading Naked Lunch, showed me a Pig Farm, which is now the site of Canada’s largest mass murders, was a ten-minute bike ride in one totally different reality in literature, with his mix of realism and fiction, all sordid and gloomy. direction. And the other way was where Terry Fox, one of Canada’s greatest heroes, lived. He lost his leg to cancer and then attempted to run across the country. So there were many paths to follow. Editing DG: I’m not always talking about me or about my background in my work, but I’m the first person Sources involved. It’s more complicated: it has to do with a way of perceiving things and the world I live SS: I just got involved with collecting photographs to use as reference materials for painting and in. I’d like to think that, with every step I take in my work, I’m leaving things behind; among them, drawing ideas. I had slowly become obsessed with just collecting pictures and then figuring out how all that purely expressive or sentimental stuff in favor of a saner, calmer, more temperate vision. to make art out of all of it. The process of collecting also distracted me from drawing or painting for I’d like the work to capture something of the serene disposition that, for instance, my maternal five or six years. I began to draw from the world of images I’d collected a couple years back with the grandparents Uncle Ismael and Aunt Munda (as they’re called in their hometown) had. I grew up longhairs series. The drawings were inspired by a collection of 800 or 900 jpegs I had collected of watching television and looking at tons of pictures in magazines; some of that clearly stayed with guys with long hair. I kept using the computer to scan through them pulling ones that I associated me, mixed up with the personal stuff. It’s true that I don’t always play with the emotional, which isn’t with a historical portraiture type. Like, oh this guy looks like a Dürer, this guy looks like a Bruegel an easy device to exploit. I at least try to avoid that in favor of something that eludes me, something peasant, this one looks like a Rubens female nude, but it’s a guy. The jpeg sources will rarely have more unconscious. much detail, which is good; they’re only something specific for me to start with. I want to invent the detail with the materials I’m drawing with or invent the colors with my paints. Influences DG: My taste is for certain (primarily Mexican) artists who have left a mark on me over the various Symbolism phases of my work. It’s not a historical, or theoretical, or nationalistic revision—it’s purely and SS: I began to realize connections with other Symbolist artists whose sensibilities contained the simply my personal selection: Otto Dix, José Clemente Orozco, Philip Guston, José Luis Cuevas, idealized and often isolated figures, the androgyny, the stillness, the invented spaces, and the Vlady, Gilberto Aceves Navarro, Germán Venegas, Roberto Turnbull, Mariano Villalobos, José Luis metaphorical use of color that I was drawn to use in my paintings. As with the long hair, it allowed Sánchez Rull, and Paul McCarthy. The idea is to show the wider context—the particular background, rhythm and the movement of the hand to come into my work. To me it would seem more interesting the influences—of this group of artists who have all used drawing pretty recurrently over their to paint a figure that possessed ambiguity. You cold get more out of one figure if there’s also the respective careers, in their overall bodies of work. I would also like to find a kind of leitmotif in terms possibility it could be male or female. And I think it adds an odd stillness to the paintings. of expressivity, monstrosity, and gestural quality that ties them to Orozco. He is the Mexican artist Identity whose drawings interest me the most, especially for how much his work in drawing has influenced Richard Flood: Do you consider yourself a conceptualist, or is that too confining? this kind of generation I focus on in my project. Besides, these artists’ ways of dealing with drawing SS: No, I think of myself as a figurative painter. undoubtedly also associates them with other (non-Mexican) artists I’ve included in the project. Steven Shearer was born in New Westminster, was raised in Port Coquitlam and now lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. He Daniel Guzmán was born in Mexico City in 1964 where he continues to live and work. He received his degree in Visual Arts at received a BFA in studio arts from Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1992. Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in 1993.

For information on exhibition-related programs at the New Museum, please visit newmuseum.org/events or call 212.219.1222 x261. “Double Album: Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer” is organized by Richard Flood, Chief Curator. Docent tours are free with Museum admission and take place Wednesday “Double Album: Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer” is made possible by a generous grant from the American Center Foundation. through Sunday at 2 and 4 p.m., as well as Fridays at 7 p.m. Spanish and Additional support is provided by Susan Almrud, The Audain Foundation, The Rennie Collection, The Robert Mapplethorpe Chinese tours are available on Saturdays and Sundays. For group tours, Photography Fund, and the Toby Devan Lewis Emerging Artists Exhibitions Fund. Support for the accompanying publication please visit newmuseum.org/learn or call 212.219.1222 x235. has been provided by the J. McSweeney and G. Mills Publications Fund at the New Museum, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, Target First Saturdays For Families take place on the first Saturday of every Galleria Franco Noero, Turin, Harris Lieberman, New York, kurimanzutto, Mexico City, and Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London. month at 10 a.m. and 11 a.m., and are free to the public. Advance registration Transportation assistance provided by the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores and The Mexican Cultural Institute of New York. is required, and space is limited. For more information, please visit newmuseum.org/learn/school_and_youth or call 212.219.1222 x235. Cover: Steven Shearer, Dirtyface, 2001, Collection of the artist. Cover: Daniel Guzmán, A Place Where Nobody’s Ever Been Before, 2007, Collection of the artist.