After researching, compiling and archiving a history of independently produced television, Montreal artist Daniel Barrow turned the information he’d collected into the archival, curatorial Winnipeg Babysitter.
Curated and performed by Barrow, Winnipeg Babysitter will take place at 7pm tonight at the Nat Taylor Cinema, N102 Ross Building, Keele campus. A Q-&-A session will follow the 90-minute performance in the Grad Lounge, S166 Ross Building.
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, and Barrow began to research and compile the history of independently produced television.
Right: Daniel Barrow, Big Eye, 2008, Ink, watercolour and collage on paper. Image courtesy of the artist and Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto
Winnipeg Babysitter is presented with the support of the Creative Arts Student Association, the Trans Bisexual Lesbian Gays Allies at York, and Fine Arts Cultural Studies and the Department of Visual Arts in the Faculty of Fine Arts.
Following Winnipeg Babysitter, Barrow’s exhibition Emotional Feelings will be presented in conjunction with the 23rd annual Images Festival at the Art Gallery of York University from March 31 to June 6. The opening reception for Emotional Feelings will run Wednesday, March 31, from 6 to 9pm at the AGYU in the Accolade East Building.
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.
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 for the Arts’ 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.
The AGYU is open Monday to Friday, from 10am to 4pm; Wednesday, from 10am to 8pm; and Sunday from noon to 5pm. Admission to everything is free.
For more information, visit the AGYU Web site or call ext. 55169.