Steven Shearer’s sleeping people photo series, Untitled, 2020, was met with a myriad of responses at Vancouver’s Capture Photography Festival 2021 before they were obscured. Shearer, who had represented Canada in the Venice Biennale in 2011, has a primarily painting, drawing, and found-image collage based practice. His digital archive of photos, culled from various internet sources, is larger than 63,000 images. The shots for the festival were carefully chosen from this archive. They depicted portraits of people in varied conditions of repose; appearing similar to representations of states of exaltation, as seen in classical paintings of saints. However, as a member of the general public pointed out, they also evoked chilling symbolism given the context of Vancouver’s opioid crisis.
As one artist put it, “A friend raised a valid point about the eeriness of what some people took to be images of dead people during the pandemic, which has caused considerable casualties and sickness, and a fair bit of Trading Portraits for Landscapes Cherie Crocker stress and anxiety. I suppose this is more an issue for the curators, who could’ve maybe better ‘read the room’.” The photos were installed in Vancouver on billboards March 28th, and the exhibition was set to run from March 30th to May 21st, but the owners of the billboards, Pattison Outdoor Advertising, covered them up with stock pictures of landscapes April 1st, the day before the official opening of the festival, due to vitriolic public response.
The public distaste for the series was poignant; some argued that the people complaining about the images did not even consider them ‘art’. There was an amateur aesthetic to the snapshots as the images were taken from online sources, which did not sate a communal standard of what art should look like. Shearer has followed this vein of collecting found images of people sleeping for some time. For instance, his digital C-print photo collage of numerous slumbering individuals entitled Repose, 2004; this collage includes likenesses used in the billboards. Repose maintains a similar aesthetic to Untitled from Capture Photography Festival, revealing a long held interest in the subject matter and an incisive intention which Shearer uses in employing these portraits.
Arguably, like with all good art, audiences found the imagery provoking enough to form an opinion and a strong response, albeit a response that resulted in obfuscating the pieces. As one architect put it, “I love that the everyman were able to affect change in removing the billboards.” While covering the photos brings up discussions about who decides what is publicly displayed and censorship in art, it also highlights the ethics of using people’s images in the first place. An artist said, “They were boring when I saw them, they didn’t make me want to ask more.” They were very disinterested in the appropriation conversation around the works, though they were more piqued when they heard that the shots employed classic poses that referenced saints in ecstatic states. Regarding appropriation, another artist put it, “… people raised the inevitable issues of privacy… these found-images of people in a ‘heightened level of vulnerability and intimacy,’, are not only made to be very public, but also now controversial. For me, the most offensive part about all of this is Jim Pattison.” It seems, for some, that different concerns outweigh the privacy dialogue, while others argued that the images were already available for mass consumption due to them being online.
On its face, the insult is that renown works of art were covered with three tepid stock pictures by an advertising agency. However, these generic images do not just obfuscate, they provoke a dialogue as well. One depiction is of a goose with wings outstretched in sunlight water and trees behind; the second, a forest landscape with a river centrally cutting through it, a moose, and a big sky; and finally, the third depicts a teardrop hollow in rocks which reveals a beach and the ocean through it. It is political enough that these three stock photos of paintings hide a renown Canadian artists’ series of work, but this substitution makes a statement in spite of every attempt made to depoliticize the billboards. While they offend many’s artistic sensibilities, the loaded gesture of landscapes displayed on unceded land is, as one artist puts it, “… the demand these get covered up and replaced with landscape images is absurd. Landscape is perhaps the most political genre in unceded territories.” Consider where the landscapes are situated: on the Arbutus Greenway, in Musqueam territory, which runs from the Fraser River to False Creek in Vancouver. It is in the last quarter of a mile in False Creek, along the Arbutus Greenway, that the billboards are dispersed throughout community gardens, following the pathway. False Creek is Musqueam territory; however, the TsleilWaututh and Squamish peoples traditionally inhabit it as well – many nations often occupying it year-round as it is a shared waterway. This place of meeting, in the environment and the cultural heritage of the site, is in stark contrast to the slapped up images of ‘wild’ and ‘untouched’ landscapes, which allude to a colonial romantic conception of the land and, by extension, its’ inhabitants. The decision to go with these three images to cover Shearer’s work seemed to have been made in haste to sate public dissatisfaction, resulting in a sloppy execution.
The strength of Steven Shearer’s series Untitled as part of Capture Photography Festival 2021 lies in that they evoked a distinct response, whether it was studied apathy or scorn. The rare chance to see Shearer’s art publicly installed in Vancouver has been vetoed as the imagery has been considered too challenging. However, what conceals them has made an important political statement and, perhaps, the general populace’s response reveals something about the neighbourhood and city these billboards are situated in, and why people are so uncomfortable with images of people sleeping in public.
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