Daniel Barrow at the High Line in Manhattan, June 2010 / photo Stephanie Noritz
NEW YORK In a plain white room in a former industrial building in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, a strange narrative is taking shape. The story features a neutered cat, a horny teenager with severe pet allergies and a blind person’s phallic “reading wand.” It is a Jekyll-and-Hyde tale, redolent of good and evil, and it is the artist Daniel Barrow’s latest work-in-progress, I Have Never Felt Sexually Attracted to Anyone at All, slated to premiere at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver in early 2011.
Like the other works for which Barrow has garnered acclaim—he is on the short list for the Sobey Art Award this year for the second time, representing the Prairies and the North—the new project will comprise a performance in his signature medium of “live animation,” which combines a mesmerizing, monotone recounting of compellingly quirky stories with a nearly cinematic succession of images: the artist’s drawings on transparent Mylar manipulated on an old-school overhead projector. With such modest means, Barrow has conjured a universe of richly odd histories; those, for example, of a garbage man–cum-artist trailed by a serial killer called Bag Lady (Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry, from 2008) and of the ex-boyfriend of a Liberace-type character, existentially addled by too much plastic surgery (The Face of Everything, from 2002). Inspired by Victorian illustration, comic books, classic movies and the lectures of an eccentric art-history professor the artist encountered in university, Barrow’s masterful storytelling mixes high camp, lurid horror and histrionic sentimentality in a potent brew that engenders not only entertainingly ironic humour but a hauntingly real sense of pathos as well.
Born and raised just outside of Winnipeg, Barrow attended the University of Manitoba at the same time as members of the Royal Art Lodge and, although he relocated to Montreal last year, he still shares an interest in outlandish narratives and vintage modes of image-making with former classmates such as Marcel Dzama and Tim Gardner. In residence for six months of 2010 at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn, Barrow has described himself as “fired up” by New York, a condition borne out by his full calendar of exhibitions and performance dates in Canada and the United States, which included a spring solo show of interactive projections at the Art Gallery of York University. And all the while, peculiar stories in words and pictures continue to crystallize in that Bushwick studio.
This is an article from the Fall 2010 issue of Canadian Art. To read more from this issue, please visit its table of contents.
