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.
Since immigrating to Canada in 1972, Tom Sherman has been a video artist and writer. He is also a performance artist, appearing in many of his video installations. Much of his artwork is text-based. He incorporates his own writing into his video work with voice-over commentary. Nature, death, human-machine relationships, art and communications, are major themes in Sherman’s work. He is the author of Exclusive Memory co-published by Art Metropole and Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (2023), and Before and After the I-Bomb: An Artist in the Information Environment, edited by Peggy Gale and published by Banff Press (2002).