Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry

Winnipeg-based artist Daniel Barrow is best known for enchanting performances in which he manipulates his drawings – grotesque and mannered in a style that evokes children’s-book illustrations – with an overhead projector to create animated film-like sequences while narrating the story. His narration both lures us into the perverse, dreamlike stories, and draws attention to its own pretences and artifice. Barrow has developed his own cast of recognizable characters, chief among these an adolescent boy who radiates the anguish, fantasies and touching ambivalence of teenhood as he negotiates between childhood and an adult future.
Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry traces and develops the interior dialogue of a bitter and jaded garbage man/failed artist as he wanders aimlessly through the city streets, collecting garbage in the early hours of the morning. ‘It’s a performance set in a community that stands at the gates of hell, which sounds very dark – and it is – but I’m still in the room to moderate the gloom and darkness.’ (DB)