Montreal-based artist Daniel Barrow uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial, and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting. Since 1993, he has created and adapted comic book narratives to “manual” forms of animation by projecting, layering, and manipulating drawings on an overhead projector. Over the span of many years working as an image-maker and live performer, Barrow has developed a personal language in which video alternately coalesces with drawings on an overhead projector, with a live performer, as well as with gallery viewers.

At the AGYU, Barrow moves into new territory premiering four new projection installations and a recent work. In these new works, series of vignettes are staged between mediums. The works combine pre-recorded gestures with projections manipulated by the viewer to create and then elaborate upon images from an emotionally complex paradise.

Emotional Feelings expands upon dualistic themes from Barrow’s manually animated performance works: good versus evil, shame versus pride, experience versus innocence, and the balancing of one’s belief in miracles with an increasingly bleak and rapidly advancing future. All Barrow’s work aims to collide popular imagery from the cultural and digital past with emotional, usually melancholic, content. In so doing, he attempts a return to a former nostalgic experience of stimulus.

Barrow has exhibited widely in galleries and festivals throughout Canada and abroad. He has performed at The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), The Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago), and at The Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s 2009 Time-Based Art Festival. Barrow is the 2007 winner of The Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton award and the 2008 winner of the Images Festival’s Images Prize. Barrow is represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto.

Daniel Barrow is programmed in conjunction with the 23rd Images Festival.