Daniel Barrow
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Daniel Barrow’s lush illustrations at ThreeWalls, a brand-new gallery at 119 N. Peoria, provide a similar experience and add sardonic wit, surreal mystery, and formal elegance. His work is showcased in various formats: framed drawings, balsa airplanes, and, most striking, 30-minute “performed animations” using an overhead projector. Barrow reads aloud from a script he’s written and, with the aid of assistants, accompanies the narrative visually, moving the layers in a stack of images by hand. The stories relate dreamlike coming-of-age experiences with an odd, erudite sense of humor. The experience suggests 19th-century magic lantern parlor shows, often aimed at chil-dren. Just as those projected stills were printed on glass slides, usually made from paintings or lithographs, these transparencies are based on Barrow’s drawings in pencil, ink, and watercolor.
Barrow–who lives in Winnipeg–had a monthlong residency at ThreeWalls, during which time he completed new work and performed three of his pieces. At the show’s opening he gave performances of his new Looking for Love in the Hall of Mirrors. Barrow has returned to Canada, but video documentation of another performed animation can be seen at the gallery. And one installation, Snow Globe, gives visitors a sense of the performances. Here Barrow combines a recorded monologue about hands (taken from a statement by Helen Keller) with low-contrast video footage superimposed on simple but ingenious live animation: a small electric fan blows translucent plastic objects around a clear dish of water sitting on an overhead projector. Their motion is reproduced on a wall and framed by the silhouette of a hand both painted and projected. This ingenious, beautifully textured piece is mesmerizing.
In everything from Barrow’s flowing brushwork to his retro graphic look and magic-realist confessional melancholy, a strong connection can be made to independent or alternative comics. Aspects of Barrow’s work are as exciting as Chris Ware’s comparably ornate, nostalgic, mysterious, gloomy, and funny work, in particular Ware’s recently reissued Quimby the Mouse comics. Like Ware at his best, Barrow ravishes the beautiful surface, making the most of our child-fixated narcissistic androgyny without losing the lighthearted approach absent from supposedly deep, neosincere alternative comics.
