Steven Shearer is best known for his oil paintings of men from various subcultures – reminiscent of symbolist and pre-Raphaelite styles, such as those of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec or Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but rendered instead in vivid, psychedelic colours. Shearer consistently returns to the found imagery he collects to use as the subject matter of his collage works, which incorporate images lifted from various fan magazines as well as from the web. These references often reflect not only his own personal experience of growing up in the suburbs of Vancouver, but also a collective memory of the visual and verbal landscape of suburban and teenage alienation.

Shearer was chosen to represent Canada in the 2011 Venice Biennale. His work is included in prominent museum and public collections worldwide, among them the Kunsthaus Zürich; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; M HKA – Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Rubell Museum, Miami; and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

"I was happy to make a work that allowed for both genders and all ages. What attracted me to that subject was how I saw religious figuration cropping up in contemporary pictures of sleeping people posted on the Internet. 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 by Anthony van Dyck."

– Steven Shearer, Double Album: Daniel Guzman and Steven Shearer, New Museum April 23-July 6, 2008