Objects in Mirror by Tasman Richardson

Publisher: Impulse [b], 2023
Format: Paperback
Edition: First
Pages: 158
ISBN: 9781988817187

Tasman Richardson is his memory of screens. Video from cathode ray to capacitive pixels shapes his language, directs his understanding, and ultimately borders his imagination. Building on McLuhan’s statement “We become what we behold”, Richardson shuttles through the history of tele-vision and tele-presence, postulating consciousness itself as Gysin-esque “cut-up” collage.

Fragmented, digressive, and occasionally manic, Objects In Mirror refracts autoethnography into a technicolour meditation on our mediated world. An intimate and humourous technical-mystical delving into a distrust of all things perceived both in life and art.

His work expanded to installation with his 2000 square foot Necropolis, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, 2012. He bookended his critique of mediated gaze with Kali Yuga, Arsenal Contemporary, Montreal, 2019.

His themes to date have been a critical response to recordings which he dubbed “contemporary necromancy”, social media as a “voluntary surveillance state”, and video as “a soul without a body”.

The collected observations of over two decades of experimenting with media art are published by Impulse(b) as autobiographical anecdotes in the book Objects In Mirror launched in Toronto and Berlin in 2023.