Steven Shearer, Activity Cell with Warlock Bass Guitar (1997), Courtesy the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

NEW YORK, NY.- The New Museum presents the first U.S. surveys of Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer on view from April 23 through July 6, 2008. “Double Album: Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer” brings together two artists—Daniel Guzmán, born in Mexico in 1964, and Steven Shearer, born in Canada, in 1968—who use an array of visual media to explore the overwhelmingly male world of rock ‘n’ roll and popular subcultures as a way to look inward at themselves. With both artists creating works across a variety of mediums, including sculpture, painting, photography, and video, “Double Album” allows for Guzmán’s and Shearer’s bodies of work to be explored independently, as well as in relation to each other’s practices. “Double Album” is curated by the New Museum’s Chief Curator, Richard Flood, and will occupy the second floor of the Museum. The exhibition will be accompanied by an innovative double-cover bilingual (English/Spanish) catalogue.

Both Guzmán’s and Shearer’s work indicates a linked, parallel adaptation of 1970s and 1980s pop icons and bands as personal surrogates and avatars of contemporary identity—each hides his self-portrait in plain sight in a landscape of iconic references. The artists share a generation and an intense interest in American popular culture, particularly as revealed through heavy metal music. They also investigate the state of prolonged male adolescence and the fierce tropes of teen bravado. While their nations are essential to their identity, the artist’s notions of boundaries blur into a NAFTA-infused soup where music, movies, street credibility, and the hybrid language of popular culture coexist without border patrol. Both are masters of emblematic autobiography, and their personas inhabit their works as proxies for an adolescent legion that shared their passion for rock bands, lyrics, posters, and celebrity deifications.

Daniel Guzmán draws. His work is a tidal wave of drawing that also becomes an inventory of his drawing styles. His sources range from Aztec codices to the glory days of Mexican cartoons and Haight Ashbury psychedelia to his mental diary filled with sketches of enormous fluidity. The subjects of Guzmán’s drawings fuse old gods with current events, celebrations of the artist’s cultural idols, inventories of deadly sins, and cautionary virtues. His sculptural materials are a record of the everyday brought together to create three-dimensional fables devoted to the simple verities of living a life in a time of cultural and psychic instability. Finally, Guzmán’s videos invite the viewer into a world of sympathetic magic where life’s simple wonders still survive.

Steven Shearer curates collections. He maintains thousands of digital files from which his work is evolved and realized. Shearer harvests the aspirations of those souls wandering the Internet, riffing on air guitars, exchanging music, posting their possessions for sale, or posing as the stars they yearn to be.

From these jpeg files, Shearer creates collages that resemble epic cinematic pans, not unlike Ernest Haller’s legendary shot of a fallen Atlanta in Gone With the Wind. The subjects of his paintings of anonymous adolescents and toppled teen idols are sourced from the Internet and contain a melancholic angst that is reminiscent of Gus Van Sant’s wounded, inarticulate antiheroes, but portrayed in a palette of Fauvist colors that set off a kind of redemptive electric shock.

The exhibition catalogue is two books sharing one spine. Double Album: Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer is composed of 224 illustrated pages, with color plates including a broad cross section of both artists’ work. Each book contains interviews with the artists (Guzmán with artist Abraham Cruzvillegas; Shearer with Richard Flood); essays on both artists by Flood; and responses to the Guzmán’s and Shearer’s work by novelists Guillermo Fadanelli and Jim Lewis, respectively. Fadanelli is the author of La Otra Cara de Rock Hudson and Lodo among others and Jim Lewis is the author of Sister, The King is Dead and Why the Tree Loves the Ax. The book is designed by Purtill Family Business.

“Double Album: Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer” is made possible by a generous grant from the American Center Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Rennie Collection, The Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Fund, and the Toby Devan Lewis Emerging Artists Exhibitions Fund. Support for the accompanying publication has been provided by the J. McSweeney and G. Mills Publications Fund, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich, Galleria Franco Noero, Harris Lieberman, Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, and Stuart Shave/Modern Art. Transportation assistance provided by the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores and The Mexican Cultural Institute of New York.