Introduction
Hi everyone, I would like to share the results of a skype interview I was fortunate enough to have with modern-day storyteller Daniel Barrow. Barrow currently has a solo exhibition at the AGYU titled Emotional Feelings. The exhibition opened March 31st and closes on June 6.
The gallery space contains both digital and analog projectors. Each viewed image is made of multiple projected images arranged to register as one. Viewers are invited to interact manually with each work.
The Interview
Selena L. Lee: Looking at your previous work, you have incorporated books, performance, video and interactive installation. How do these play a role in your artist’s practice?
Daniel Barrow: My primary practice is performance and then I like to make videos and films and I’ve always wanted to make a comic book. Periodically I am asked by various galleries to install work in a space. Which is exciting to me but I guess primarily I am a storyteller. Most of my ideas relate to storytelling.
SL: When I was walking through the exhibition, I definitely got the sense that I was entering your narrative in a very open and ambiguous way. You’re not exactly holding my hand and telling me what to think but openly letting me be active and allowing me to participate.
DB: Yeah, exactly. I want the viewer to situate themselves within the narrative of each piece which is why most of the pieces have some kind of interactive element.
SL: You have kind of answered my next question already which is “where did this drive for interactivity come from?”
DB: Most of my ideas are related to performance. I have adapted them to the gallery space and have replaced my position as a performer with the viewer’s position as a spectator. Now the viewer is in control of the story.
SL: Is that what you were thinking of when making your comic books?
DB: Yeah. Did you look through my book?
SL: Yes. In relation to the tissue box projection, House on Fire, where you wave acetate in front of an overhead projector to make the projected image shimmer, I found a similar instrument in the book, which I really liked.
DB: Exactly.
SL: You can make the characters move and it seemed like I was really becoming part of your story. I thought that was clever and I’m still trying to figure out how you did it.
DB: Its pretty simple.
SL: Would you like to share?
DB: Well its just two frame animation and I registered the two frames and then placed a mask of black and white lines on top of those two registrations. I deleted everything that intersected with the black lines in one of the frames and then flattened the entre image. When you move it across black and white lines, it becomes animated.
SL: Is there a specific name for this process?
DB: I don’t know what that’s called but I call it a ‘lenticular process’ which refers to the kind of postcard that is turned back and forth to reveal a very minimally framed animation. But mine isn’t exactly that. There is no lens.
SL: Yes it is a little bit different. In that case, how does your interaction with your space around your works change your creative process? Obviously working in a book form is a more intimate and close space than working in a gallery.
DB: Right. Same process really. I’m just utilizing all the space I have. In the case of the book project I was given a specific budget and sort of predetermined the size of the page based on the dimensions of a 7 inch record. I constructed the story around those dimensions. In the case of the gallery I was sent a map of the gallery with all the dimensions and worked from there.
SL: Okay. So working in the gallery space was pretty intuitive.
DB: Yeah, to a degree.
SL: So one thing I really enjoyed about Emotional Feelings was that you used projected images, layered from different sources to register as a single image. I went to see your show twice actually – once on opening night and once by myself. So I found that going by myself I was a lot more brave to interact with your different pieces and I let myself go from projector to projector, covering up the projectors to see what part of the image was coming from that source. I really like having that more intimate interaction with your work. In the end does this have something to do with your works being continually ‘in process’?
DB: I think I am just expanding a language that I have been developing since art school and pushing it in new directions and trying to be more innovative. My show at the AGYU allowed me a large space and I had a bigger budget to work with. I had more equipment, more electricity and was able to create images that I couldn’t create in a studio space.
SL: Would you like to do another show like this again?
DB: I would, yeah.
SL: And at the same time, would you ever consider letting go of the small intimate forms of your work and focusing solely on installation based, still incorporating performance but on a different scale and reaching more people at the same time.
DB: Well small intimate spaces are always readily accessible to any artist so there will never be any shortage of those kinds of spaces. But I guess at this point in my career it is more interesting for me to think that I might have access to bigger spaces.
SL: And more possibilities with that.
DB: Right.
SL: To continue from that question, does projecting your images out of multiple different sources for tie into being ‘parts within a whole’?
DB: Do you mean like a metaphor?
SL: Yeah, as a metaphor. With your installations even though you are looking at one picture, that it only a portion of the entire exhibit and after looking at the exhibit there is always your personal projections of what you place on top of imagery, and that allows you to see what you want to see.
DB: Right. Are you talking about the viewer or me the artist?
SL: In this case, more for the viewer. Obviously you as the artist will always have this part of the piece but I suppose the question is ‘in their participation, is the viewer is an essential part in completing your project?”
DB: Yeah, that’s for sure. Based on just trying to allow the viewer access into my position as creator and performer. Their experience is to activate the piece and bring their own narrative and associative experience to the work.
SL: Opening nights always are an interesting social situation – looking into each image and finding these intricacies like in Canopy Bed, with the mermaid and the king I suppose. I was looking deeper into it and I noticed the tissues that were flying around kind of looked like condoms. In the second room I was covering up different parts of the projections and I realized that the tissue box was a vagina and all these fleshy tissues would come out of it. Which I found very amusing and interesting once I explored a little bit more and spent more time with the exhibition.
Is your drawing style is something you have developed since art school?
DB: Oh, probably before that. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t drawing all the time. As a kid I drew daily and that very quickly became a part of my identity as a kid, and as a student so I was encouraged to do it more. By the time I was of university age I entered an art school program. – yeah over the span of a lifetime I have intuitive developed a definite drawing style but there are definite influences.
Specifically in this body of work, I worked with very limited frames of animation so I had to contain as much expression and gesture in the image – and so I am very influenced in that regard by Victorian and theatrical illustration.
SL: Almost to the point that you have so much gesture that there is just something very grotesque about your drawings. They’re very emotive. They’re definitely not portraits but they’re almost caricatures. In seeing this image its like you’re seeing the personality they really are.
DB: I’m trying to contain as much emotion and theatricality in as few images as possible. That might be read by some viewers as grotesque.
SL: How would this relate to film?
DB: Film is probably my primary influence and reference and its part of the reason that I want my images to move, to be animated – and usually to be combined with words – although there are no words in this particular exhibition.
SL: When I was walking through I felt that you considered the technology as much as the imagery itself – although this is coming from my background as a visual artist in which I consciously consider the technology I am using. Would you say I’m on the right track with this? Do you consider different levels of obsolete technology you are using?
DB: It’s not so much that I want with all of my technology to be obsolete, it’s that I want the tech to be laid bare. I like all of my technology to remain exposed and become a part of the space and the sculpture of the piece, and I like that people can trace back the origins of each image like you did with each projector. I suppose I like that there are nostalgic associations to obsolete technology but I guess my primary aim is to keep my technology very simple and not intimidating – for myself and for the viewing audience.
SL: Personally I found that with the tech there was an interconnectivity within the space. Projections would cross over each other. Just because one projector was close to a particular image does not mean that it is contributing to that image. You have a crossover of paths. When you moved around in the space you could really get that.
To consider exploring boundaries and a space of ambiguity between two opposites, I saw dualities of pain and pleasure, aggression and submission, and the static and moving image. Can you elaborate more on the dualities you were working with for this exhibition?
DB: Can you make your question a little more specific? I did want to create images that were incredibly dense. I liked the idea that if you moved across space your shadow would intersect with different projectors so you would only mask part of the image when you moved across the room.
I also wanted some of the elements of the image to remain static, coming from an overhead projector for instance, and then those static images to intersect with other parts of the image which were projected through water and thereby to create a visually and emotionally complex image. I wanted to introduce a new kind of image to the viewer.
SL: The exhibition catalog noted that your performances include dualities of good vs. evil, shame vs. pride, experience vs. innocence. Can you elaborate more on these emotional dualities and how they draw from your personal experiences?
DB: I guess in my work I am trying to replicate a very specific brand of irony. I want to create images that encompass dualities and in that way are very complex and allow the viewer a very rich and emotional response. Sadness doesn’t need to eclipse happiness for example.
SL: Does fate play a part in your work?
DB: I don’t know, that’s the big mystery right? I guess I’m less interested in answering that question than reposing that question to a viewer and allowing a viewer to answer those kinds of questions for themselves.
SL: I’m wondering if you ever have viewers look at your work and connect with it in a way you would never personally have made that connection yourself.
DB: Oh yeah, all the time. Like I said, everyone brings their own associations to the piece. It’s unavoidable. At the same time I do want to direct the viewer in a certain way and very creatively and artistically limit an emotional response with parameters, but I want there to be a generous amount of emotional space within those parameters.
SL: Which parameters were you thinking of for Emotional Feelings?
DB: Well the title just sets up those parameters in a way, cueing the viewer to approach this exhibition with emotional feelings as opposed to a cerebral interpretation of the work.
SL: With this influx of new technology, how will that effect your work in the future?
DB: I’m far more interested in working with technologies that make sense to me. I would like to do a performance on skype for instance, but only because this technology is reasonably simple. I mean the technology is probably very complicated, by the experience of it is very simple. It’s a technology that was anticipated for years. A very simple, face-to-face conversation that transcends the boundaries of location is something that everyone is very familiar with.
Otherwise, I’m quite happy to explore my own personal, visual language on overhead projectors and creating really simple video animations. Part of the concept of “Emotional Feelings” was to create complicated animated images using as few computers as possible. For instance all the hair and curtains in the mermaid piece were depicted by video taping manually spun drawings and masks of black paper.
SL: And you built all the instruments yourself?
DB: I did. When the viewer starts to animate the gesture of lovemaking between the king and the mermaid, that’s going to be a gesture that visually harmonizes with all the other manual gestures that are prerecorded on video.
SL: And for a final question, what are your thoughts on nostalgia? So on our current obsession with things that are vintage, appropriating old videos to make them into something new? Is this something you’re connected with?
DB: Yeah, I mean I’m drawn to objects with nostalgic associations. I like collecting all the toys from my childhood and I think when you’re a kid certain images have a psychological power that they wont have later in life. I think a lot of artists, whether they realize it or not, are trying to recreate images or experiences they only vaguely remember from their childhood.
SL: So how did these images connect to your childhood?
DB: None of these images connect directly to my own childhood but they are a composite of vaguely remembered images from television and I guess more specifically from furtively looking at the cartoons in my uncle’s porn magazines.
SL: I guess that is true, we all have our moments of being pushed into growing up really fast.