To talk with Winnipeg-based artist Daniel Barrow about his work is, on one hand, to be necessarily intimate. He is the first to admit that what he does is indeed about him — his experiences, his feelings, his concerns. Yet what Barrow does — his performances, for which he is perhaps best known, involve the manual animation of images on an overhead projector with music and spoken narration — is also vitally dependent on fantasy and allegory. It’s not an evasion so much as a very specific mode of confession. And to discuss it in an interview, rather than to see it unfold when and where it was meant to, can feel cold and awkward.

Barrow, however, is hardly quiet about what he’s after. He announces minutes into our phone conversation that his new, three-years-in-the-making piece, Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry — which premieres at Harbourfront Centre April 10 — is “darker and more political than anything I’ve done before” and that “it expresses my frustration with the last two decades of the human species.
“It feels really exciting but really scary,” he says of the project’s ambitions, “because it feels epic to me and it means a lot to me personally — it makes me feel fragile. I spent so much time with the story, writing and rewriting it, redrawing it. Some of the images from it that are on my website [which have already been shown in Toronto at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects and Mercer Union] you won’t even see in the finished piece. I’m actually so close to it at this point that I’m keen to see how an audience reacts.”

Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry takes place in “the not-too-distant future” and concerns a garbage man who is creating a directory for the dystopian community in which he lives, but who is thwarted by a serial killer who attempts to off anyone included in the book. Barrow wants to “strike a balance between a realistic perspective of the current state of affairs — the fact that it doesn’t look good — and a belief in miracles.” I ask him if he means humanist or supernatural miracles, and he responds, “Humanist, I guess.

“I don’t know that my work has a message per se,” he explains. “I want to touch people but to me the easiest way to do that is one person at a time. All of my work is about fostering a sense of intimacy between me and the viewer. It’s far more important to me to stay engaged with the work than for me to reach mass audiences or to have huge commercial success.”

On that note, we broach his continued residence in Winnipeg, where he was born and raised, and while he is happy to demystify the city (“We’re definitely not the cultural capital of North America,” he quips), he concedes that it affords him “more independence” and a “simpler lifestyle” than most bigger cities would. 

“I’m more social when I’m on the road than when I’m in Winnipeg,” he says. Does that mean he’s predominantly shy and easily mortified, like so many characters in his work? “I’ve never been someone who’s typically embarrassed for myself,” he answers. “I’m more likely to be embarrassed for other people. For instance, once I vomited on a public bus. I didn’t feel even remotely embarrassed. But if someone else would have done that, I would have turned red.”