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.
