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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2010 > April > 26 > Entry
Fusebox 2010: Daniel Barrow’s ‘Everytime I See Your Picture I Cry’
With a simple overhead projector and hundreds of drawings on mylar transparency, Daniel Barrow charmed with an odd yet compelling tale — a meditation on the desire, and the failure, for true human connection in our very disconnected times.
The Winnipeg-based artist presented his ‘Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry’ — a live manual animation performance — to a sold out house at the Off Center as part of the Fusebox Festival.
Sitting at the overhead projector, Barrow layered the drawings on the projector, manipulating them at time to create a gentle, fluid type of animation. A soundtrack by Amy Linton added to the moodiness.
Along the way, Barrow’s gentle voice spins a quirky, melancholy tale that nevertheless ruminates on the nature of love and art.
Barrow’s is a comic book style tale told in chapters. And while his soft color palette may recall a kind of vintage mid-century illustration, Barrow’s images bear plenty of violence and sheer ugliness — a kind of prism of pathos, loveliness and humor the entire piece presents us with.
Our narrator is a garbage man — a failed art school grad and inviterate collector. Hampered by chronic eye problems his life’s gesamtkunstwerk — which he calls “an art project for everyone” — is to create a phone book that wholly and completely chronicles the lives of those around him. An admirer of quotidian stuff, he assembles his phone book by gathering scraps from the garbage cans he empties every day. He also mines memory, history, framing each subject by tracing their image through a window spying on people rather than connecting.
But the garbage man’s attempt at capturing such portraits leads to their — and ultimately, his — violent demise. Art — believe in it and it can kill, you know.
At times, Barrow’s tale skidded dangerously close to being too precious — the juxtapositions that fed the quirkiness of his story seeming a little too pat.
In the end, though, the essential charm — the ‘handmade and heartfelt-ness’ — of Barrow’s low-tech animation kept preciousness in check.
Tonight, Barrow presents his video-based performance ‘Winnipeg Babysitter’ at 8 p.m. See www.fuseboxfestival.com
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