Guitar No. 5

Comprising hundreds of images that the artist has culled from eBay or personal homepages, "Guitar No. 5" not only documents the ever-shifting inventory of images available on the Internet, but also portrays a virtual community of individuals invested in collective rock star fantasies. For Shearer, amateur guitarists are not only products of the music and culture industries, but also symbols of and participants in a “proletarian folk art.” Among the anonymous images, Shearer has included photographs of himself as a teenager, proudly posing with his own guitars. In associating his adolescent desires with the collective fantasies of these virtual communities, Shearer adds an autobiographical twist to his anthropological study and affirms his own participation in the heavy metal subculture.