Art Metropole

13 Jan. 2024

Double Book Launch: Tom Sherman's 'Exclusive Memory: A Perceptual History of the Future' and 'Marshall Needles Mosquitoes'

Artist

Tom Sherman

Time

2-5PM

On Saturday, January 13, 2024, Art Metropole held the official launch for two books by Tom Sherman, Exclusive Memory: A Perceptual History of the Future and Marshall Needles Mosquitoes.

Exclusive Memory: A Perceptual History of the Future is a compendium of descriptive, speculative prose and text-images by the Governor General’s Award-winning artist, Tom Sherman. Its contents sweep across five decades, describing radically different periods and environments — from Sherman’s early experiments in Toronto in the 1970s to his recent explorations of text and image in Nova Scotia’s South Shore.

At the core of this volume is “The Faraday Cage,” a text that delivers a vivid cascade of images of the art scene in Toronto at the onset of the video era in the early 1970s. This opening chapter expands into a series of essays in which Sherman pictures a vast horizon of contexts: urban, rural, social, political, economic, and in some cases, simply a beach along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. His ongoing and rigorous investigation into the intersections of art, technology, and life itself is grounded in the converging terrains of mediaspheres and landscapes.

And then, in a quick shift of perspective enter Peggy Gale and Caroline Seck Langill, who charge the book with wide-sweeping conversations about Sherman’s practice: his use of written language and dynamic, critically engaged “pictures,” the expansive reach of his text-based visual works, and the distinctive character of his voice.

The result is a provocative retrospective in book form that both demonstrates and expands upon Tom Sherman’s clear, forward-looking vision.

Exclusive Memory: A Perceptual History of the Future was edited by David Diviney and co-published by Goose Lane Editions, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and Art Metropole.
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A critical fiction book, Marshall Needles Mosquitoes, Tom Sherman’s recent title, is a creative book for readers of visual arts, new media, and technology.

In the text and image book artwork, Sherman creates chapters of contemporary stories and historical accounts he has written since 2022 from Nova Scotia. As an agent provocateur his displaced position to parts of the southern continent, he takes a step back to allow readers to connect to an earlier time in Caracas to new migrating ecologies in the Canadian landscape. The photographs of fossil like curios, electric guitars, and perforations of memory in a telephone, presents readers with a text and image narrative to connect to this social body in a world of climate-driven natural disasters, receding shorelines, and the erosion of video with human nature in art.

Select actors enter the short stories and are part of the literary experience Sherman is creating, as Foucault noted it is what determines the human identity in nature, the author connects to the words and images as within a human condition caught in a techno-controlled climate of a changing economic, political, and social shifting with the natural world.
Marshall Needles Mosquitoes was edited by Denise Frimer and published by Impulse[b]

Tom Sherman is an artist and writer, who works across media (print, video, radio, performance, the web). Sherman represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1980, and has been featured in hundreds of international exhibitions and festivals, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, National Gallery of Canada, Museum of Modern Art (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art, and Documenta X. He has published extensively, including Cultural Engineering and Before and After the I-Bomb: An Artist in the Information Environment and was the founding Head of the Media Arts Section of the Canada Council in 1983. In 1997 Sherman founded Nerve Theory, a recording and performance duo with Viennese musician and composer Bernhard Loibner, and the duo has contributed to many radio venues internationally. Sherman has received the Bell Canada Award for excellence in video art, the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Art, and is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Film and Media Arts at Syracuse University.

Image

Tom Sherman, Exclusive Memory.

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