Steven Shearer, Oueff 2000. Courtesy of Ikon Gallery

The iconic 1970s heavy metal and rock music scene, and the generation of adolescent boys whose lives were influenced by it, is the inspiration behind the work of artist Steven Shearer and the subject of a new exhibition of his work.

Steven Shearer’s eponymously titled show runs at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham until July 15 2007 and is the first solo show in the UK by the Canadian artist. It is particularly fitting that Shearer is showing in Birmingham, being the city whose working class background that gave rise to bands such as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.

His work is concerned with the visual language of heavy metal sub-cultures, class and suburban teenage identity and aspiration, articulated through found amateur photographic documentation and reworked as large-scale archival pieces, collages, sculptures, drawings, painting and text works.

Shearer’s work involves collecting thousands of found photographs from 1970s fanzines, teen magazines, discarded photo albums and the internet. The attraction of these images lies in their poor composition and a non-manipulated, amateur aesthetic.

Steven Shearer, Boy’s Life (detail) 2004. Courtesy of Ikon Gallery

The found images are then systemised into works such as Boy’s Life 2004 (detail), a huge collage that could represent the bedroom wall of any typical heavy-metal fan in the 1970s. It works as both a general statement on boyhood adolescence and an intimate view of Shearer’s own teenage psyche.

Such images could provide material for a fascinating anthropological and social study, and have autobiographical significance as Shearer often inserts images of himself into the works, thereby aligning his practice with a kind of sincerity and empathy for his subject and not allowing his work simply to be read as ironic.

Steven Shearer, Swinging Lumpen 2002

“I see the rock paraphernalia as both a culture industry product as well as a form of proletarian folk art,” Shearer has stated.

Certainly, the subjects of his paintings are drawn from the margins of society – what Karl Marx termed the lumpenproletariat, the lowest level of the proletariat who populate the underworld and are characterised by a lack of class identification and solidarity.

Lumpen is derived from the German for “rag-picker” and Shearer has used the word to title one of his works. Swinging Lumpen 1997 references the early British Pop artist Richard Hamilton’s iconic Swingeing London 67, based on the newspaper photograph of Robert Fraser and Mick Jagger handcuffed in the back of a police van after being arrested for drug possession.

This image is echoed in Shearer’s enlarged canvas-laminated photograph of a teenager giving the finger, obscuring his face while showing off his attitude, much the same way that Fraser and Jagger conceal their faces from the paparazzi’s camera lens.

Steven Shearer, Larry 2005. Courtesy of Ikon Gallery

The archival works are shown alongside recent paintings and drawings, which Shearer views as an important culmination of the image collecting process. The subjects are derived largely from his liking of images creating many cross references.

In the process of re-working these via conventional means, in crayon as in Longhairs (2004), oil paint, Smoker (2005) or blue biro, The Convalescent (2006) new associative meanings are created that wed motifs from popular culture with art historical references such as German Expressionism and sixteenth-century Realism.

In Larry 2005, the subject is androgynous, with long soft hair and almost feminine body; gentle yet powerful, as though aspiring to a machismo that only serves to underscore his vulnerability. The stylistic technique is borrowed from Munch and Toulouse-Lautrec and the whole effect is one that seems to condense a feeling, a memory, and somehow give it a timeless quality.

Of his work, Shearer has said: “I am interested in the times I’m living in and in the way the past echoes in them.” In seeking to find the relevance of the past in the present, Shearer invests these images with a fresh lease of life.