Tom Sherman was working in video before most people had even heard of the medium. Now that video is everywhere, from cell-phone screens to architectural projections, he continues to perfect his video messages, contemplating the way his video art functions in an information economy. His love of raw, explicit video recordings, where content demands a simple, elegant syntactic form, sets his video art apart from a field florid with simulation and hypermedia. His early work took a scalpel to the mass media, revealing the way formulaic culture engineers conformity and passivity.
As television, radio and newspapers collapsed into decentralized digital networks, his attention shifted to existential concerns, examining the way individuals are digitally extracted from flesh and blood communities. His millennial pursuit has been rural and natural, a dialogue between the artist, the Nova Scotian landscape and its native species. From his home just outside Liverpool on Nova Scotia's South Shore, he is fond of pointing out that the avant-garde has gone 'country.'
Tom Sherman was nominated by Richard Kerr, professor, Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University, Montreal.