Exclusive Memory

"Tom Sherman: Exclusive Memory provides a long-overdue retrospective on the work of the Governor General's Award-winning artist Tom Sherman--from his early experiments with video art in 1970s Toronto to his recent explorations of text and image in the landscape of Nova Scotia's South Shore. Arriving in Canada from the United States in the early 1970s, Sherman quickly became a fixture in Toronto's burgeoning artist-led cultural scene. In an era captivated by the development of new media and its possibilities, Sherman's Faraday Cage, a six-foot square enclosure of aluminum sheeting, captured the prevailing zeitgeist. At the centre of Tom Sherman: Exclusive Memory is an essay by Sherman about his early experiences in Toronto and the development of video art as the medium best suited for conveying ideas derived from text and image. Readers will find several of Sherman's previously published texts that reflect on technology and art, including his seminal multimedia installation Exclusive Memory, as well as more recent unpublished text-image works. The result is a compendium that spans almost five decades, chronicling the career of an artist whose work remains highly detailed and unquestionably current."--