Hundreds of pictures fished from the infinite storehouse of the Internet and combined into one gigantic, teeming image. Every single picture is evidence of the achieving of a boyhood dream: me and my guitar. We see people in front of us and all we know of them is the importance of having their guitar with them in their portraits, otherwise they would not have put these images in the net as their personal visiting cards. Some copy rock star poses; others pluck the strings dreamily. All of them are in homey surroundings. For the research on the guitar players, the artist used a photo search engine which he fed with key phrases such as “me and my guitar”, sometimes in other languages.

The Canadian Steven Shearer does a kind of fieldwork of popular culture. In the guitar subculture more than anywhere else, he sees a global “proletarian culture”. Shearer grew up in the black metal scene in Vancouver so he knows from his own experience how much the pictorial language of pop culture – however pitiful it may be – serves to visually decorate one’s own adolescent fantasies.

For his digital archive, along with the poses of guitarists and drummers, Shearer collects mostly images of the products of rock merchandising that fans use to decorate their rooms. A multi-part assemblage which, apart from photo collages, also includes sculptures, drawings and paintings, is dedicated to fan articles about the band Black Sabbath: “It was about artefacts with which one can enter a specific social space.” The cumulative aspect is decisive in Shearer’s work – he considers himself as the curator of a “museum” – the dialectic between the flood of photos and the individual image, between anonymity and bewilderment.

Wolfgang Kos, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)