Transparency and Layers

Writer, illustrator and performer Daniel Barrow animates live.

In a dark room full of people, Daniel Barrow sits beside an overhead projector, his gentle voice unfurling the story of an art student turned garbage collector who chronicles the lives of the people around him in a bizarre sort of telephone directory. Barrow narrates while his hands manipulate layers of illustrated Mylar transparencies over a video projection to create a moving narrative with live animation.

Barrow is performing Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry, a dark, funny show about an outcast who digs through detritus as part of an intimate art project that gets stopped short by a maniacal killer. As the garbage collector snoops into people’s windows and dumpsters, the killer follows behind him, knocking off one person at a time. Barrow’s award-winning piece, which has toured widely since its premiere in 2008, features a modest, sweet score by Amy Linton of the Aislers Set.

“I came to performance by accident,” Barrow says, on the phone from his home in Montreal. While studying art history in college, he gave a parody lecture that ignited a love affair with obsolete technology, the overhead projector in particular. In the years since, he’s developed his own cinematic visual language and narrative style.

“It’s really about stacking all my visual ideas into a story,” says Barrow, whose work nods to graphic novels, cartoons and film. “I’m drawn to artists who wish to depict emotional experiences in a very vivid way. I watch a lot of horror films.”

Like the drawings in all of Barrow’s productions, the candy-colored illustrations in Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry are florid, meticulous, obsessive. The piece began as a fixation with drawing telephone books and eyedroppers. “It starts with specific visual ideas, this inclination to draw gestures over and over again,” he says. then it evolved and developed over a long period. A first draft of Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry emerged in 2002 only to be overhauled and work- shopped twice more before its 2008 premiere. to date, Barrow has performed the piece more than 100 times around the world, mastering its rhythm. His oct. 22 performance at the FRED Wildlife refuge is his first performance in Seattle.

Though Barrow could produce his work as a graphic novel or an animated film, performing live is his way to “moderate a sense of intimacy and strike some emotional chords” with himself and his audience. Full of empathy and introspection, Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry is testimony to human resiliency; its protagonist overcomes great physical and emotional pain by focusing on the detailed lives of others.

“I don’t have a specific mission, but I definitely have some preoccupations,” Barrow says. “If you were to distill my work into a central message or theme, it’s about articulating the beauty in sadness, exploring visual history, a depiction of melancholy.”

Daniel Barrows performs Oct. 22 at Heineken City Arts Fest. 

Photography by Sonia Yoon