Daniel Barrow
Emotional Feelings

31 March – 6 June 2010

Opening Reception: Wednesday, March 31, 6 – 9 pm
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 two new projection installations. In these 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. 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.
Come celebrate the opening of Daniel Barrow’s exhibition and the Images Festival’s pre-festival launch party at AGYU. Visitors will receive a free screening voucher!
Daniel Barrow is programmed in conjunction with the 23^rd Images Festival

Get on the Performance Bus

Get your harnesses on for a radical ride on The Performance Bus with maximalist artist Allyson Mitchell. She’ll take you there – errr… out there – to Daniel Barrow’s opening her way. No wayyou’ll want to miss this. It’s herstory in the making, on top of the emotional feelings! The free Performance Bus departs OCAD at 6 pm sharp and returns downtown at 9 pm.

Programming – Out There

Winnipeg Babysitter
Curated and Performed by Daniel Barrow
Nat Taylor Cinema, York University
Friday 26 March, 6:00 pm
90:00 minutes
In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Winnipeg experienced a “golden age” of public access television, when anyone with a creative dream, concept, or politic would be endowed with airtime and professional production services.  When Shaw cable purchased Winnipeg’s local cable station, a rumour began that the company had destroyed the public access archives and were systematically dismantling their public access services. Daniel Barrow began researching, compiling, and archiving a history of independently produced television that manifested itself into an archival, curatorial presentation the Winnipeg Babysitter.
Presented with the support of Fine Arts Cultural Studies, the Trans Bisexual Lesbian Gays Allies at York (TBLGAY), and Department of of Visual Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts.

Audio Out

Did you hear the one about the 24-hour loop? New Time (Before, there were stars) was Gwen MacGregor and Lewis Nicholson’s contribution to the Audio Out series of sound installations. Alas, the around-the-clock recounting of the ticks and whirrs of Harrison clocks has gone silent in our hallway. On the positive side, taking New Time’s place just outside our lobby door is Outside our Doors, an audio piece by Janice Gurney.
Stay tuned for the summer when the next, and final installment (for this season, anyway) of Audio Out will be presented, a compilation of works by York University students of Marc Couroux. Finally, in the fall, we will have together a CD compilation of the seasons’ presentations.

Studio Blog:

November 11, 2009: emelie, the journal will begin tomorrow, I recommend you to print every page and paste it on a wall, let see what happens.
I`m happy we met…
Crazy things happening everyday…daniel.
Studioblog
Chance meetings and strange encounters: these are the adventures of Daniel Santiago. He’s an artist living in Colombia on the quest to find fiction’s ending…but this is just the beginning of the story. He documents his real life adventures in diaries that act as oblique self-portraits, framed by fictions he creates and vice-versa. And the story continues. Before Daniel Santiago got his Blackberry, these diaries-cum-self-portraits usually took the form of a book of images and text, for instance, The Adventures of Daniel and Santiago, which charted the life of identical twins Daniel and Santiago on their quest to find out their fiction – the author of their story – who was, in fact, the real Daniel Santiago.
(See http://www.zonezero.com/EXPOSICIONES/fotografos/salguero/indexsp.html) The twins were two sides of the same person, a person with two first names and a self-portrait of Santiago’s travels through South America. (Daniel incidentally has just recently had twins himself… with fiction now framing his real life.)
Now armed with the Blackberry, Daniel Santiago has the potential to create a real time diary of his life. This studio blog presents a day-by-day account of Daniel’s adventures sent to AGYU Assistant Director/Curator Emelie Chhangur: surreal and beautiful images, one a day, everyday, since November 2009 that form an ongoing Internet encounter that started just after their chance meeting. Staircases that go no place, representations of man-made and natural energy, pruned humans, and pedestrian spirals—images that represent Daniel but also symbolically speak about the nature communication and technology. Take the journey through Daniel’s yearlong image journal – from November 12, 2009 to November 11, 2010.

Foreign Agent – Mexico City

The Foreign Agent series continues with a trip to Mexico as our cultural attaché Rodrigo Hernandez-Gomez brings us insider information from the streets of Mexico City. Gaining access to numerous performances around the city, Hernandez-Gomez will show give a slideshow of recent artists and collectives that are testing the limits and potential of Mexico City’s public spaces and institutions. He will also take us on a journey through the complexity of the city’s museums and reveal new trends in artist publications.

ABotM

What’s 140 feet long when open, but only 8.5 inches closed? Give up?
How about this: What was ten years in the making, and 4,750 some pages long? Still no idea?
One more clue: What consists of over 100 books and is in the lobby of the AGYU?
That’s right, you guessed it. The books submitted to the first ever Artist Book of the Moment competition, better known as the ABotM (the ‘a’ is silent). The books came fast and furious, and our jury (Micah Lexier, Ann Dean, and Joe Friday) had their work cut out for them. After much long deliberations, the short list for the prize has been made (list available on the website) and we congratulate all those books whose status has been upgraded to ABotM status. And, hold your horses ’cause the one book that has risen to the top of the ABotM will be announced on the night of the opening of Daniel Barrow’s most excellent exhibition.
http://www.theAGYUisOutThere.org/books

Spring Contemporary Art Bus

On Sunday, 11 April, join us at the Art Gallery of York University for a guided tour of the Daniel Barrow’s exhibition. The free bus will begin with a tour of the OCAD Professional Gallery (100 McCaul St) at noon and departs to the AGYU and Doris McCarthy Gallery, returning to OCAD at 5:00 pm. Seating is limited. To reserve please contact Suzanne Carte-Blanchenot at 416-736-2100 ext. 44021 or scarte@yorku.ca.

Upcoming Programming

Humberto Vélez – residency and upcoming performance.

Get ready Toronto! Panamanian, UK-based artist Humberto Vélez is back this summer for the production phase of his multi-faceted performance and exhibition. Working with Toronto’s free runners, Capoeira dancers, the Tecumseth First Nations Collective, and the Toronto Sport Council, the residency will culminate in a public performance this fall – a sort of urban ballet for the people of Toronto.

Duke Redbird – Totem Impact

Duke Redbird is in the house with his upcoming curatorial debut and hip-hop inspired Totem Impact project, sponsored and produced by the AGYU. With the artistic direction of acclaimed Canadian film director Bruce MacDonald (Hardcore Logo), this yearlong creative endeavor transposes Duke’s iconic poem, The Beaver, into a multi-disciplinary video work that pushes straight-up activism into the mainstream. Following a “trap line” that leads from the early trading post practices of the Hudson Bay Company to a contemporary scene of “Damnation,” Totem Impact provokes discourse around Canada’s national totem – the beaver – and the impact it has on the collective consciousness of Canadian identity.

Fall Exhibition

Terrance Houle
GIVN’R
15 September – 5 December 2010
The AGYU is givn’r this fall with a blockbuster retrospective exhibition of Calgary artist Terrance Houle. Rock on.
GIVN’R is organized and toured by Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg.
The exhibition was generously supported by the Manitoba Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts and Winnipeg Arts Council.

Reports

AGYU @ 8 Fest Small Gauge Film Festival

AGYU was the proud co-presenter of the 8 Fest Small Gauge Film Festival program ZINGER! Tales from the Funnel Vol. 1 curated by Milada Kovacova, featuring artists Lorna Mills, Dave Anderson, and Jim Anderson. AGYU’s out there… everywhere!

Book (re)Launch

It was a balmy day the 23rd of January here in Toronto, which was suitable as the people they came out in droves for the screening of the newly recut Public Lighting by Mike Hoolboom at Cinecycle in downtown Toronto. This screening launched the Winter 2010 season of Pleasure Dome, and the AGYU was pleased and delighted to be able to relaunch our collection of essays Projecting Questions? Mike Hoolboom’s Invisible Man between the art gallery and the movie theatre. This book, handsomely designed by Lisa Kiss, was greeted with great delight by all present. Missed out on the night? You can always order your very own copy in our online bookstore …

Publications

New Book

We don’t do things by the half-measure here at the AGYU, and that’s why we’re pleased as punch to be releasing the double-special catalogue for Carla Zaccagnini’s no. it is opposition. exhibition. With a major essay by Emelie Chhangur on the work of Zaccagnini in English and Portuguese, as well as additional texts in English, Portuguese, and Spanish by the artist herself. Copiously illustrated, wonderfully designed (by Lisa Kiss, no less), and available for you in the AGYU lobby. Double your pleasure with Zaccagnini’s Catalogue Traduit, an artists’ book produced by the AGYU for the 2008 exhibition.

Upcoming Books:

Fastwürms returns to haunt the halls of the AGYU in the near future with the catalogue for their Donky@Ninja@Witch exhibition, including contributions by Sally MacKay, Jon Davies, Philip Monk, and Emelie Chhangur.
Terrance Houle is GIVN’R and so are we … in a co-publication with Winnipeg’s Plug In ICA documenting Houle’s touring exhibition. Details — and launch — coming with Houle’s opening at the AGYU in September 2010.