I Have Never Felt Sexually Attracted to Anyone At All

The story that evolved from that first image chronicles the relationship between a recently castrated cat, hence the title of the piece, and a young aspiring male model. The performance alternates between the two speakers, and follows their parallel stories. Although the boy loves the cat he is slowly dying from severe feline allergies.

As important as his odd and melancholic stories, and the sickly pastel colours of his drawings, is Barrow’s anachronistic technique of “manual animation.” He has made a name for himself over the past decade hunched over overhead projectors manipulating his work and narrating into a microphone to create a live movie.

Always looking to develop the language of overhead animation, Barrow’s latest project features a few new techniques. Portions of the dialogue will be read by audience members, and he’s continuing to experiment with registered video along with his traditional projections.

The film isn’t finished yet, but Barrow is presenting an excerpt along with selections from some of his other works during his residency at Gatineau’s Daimon for event called No One Helped Me. It’ll be a warm up for a coming trip to Europe and tour of Every Time….

Thanks to his art, Barrow is more like a musician than a traditional artist. He admits it can be harder for him to get engaged when performing older works.

“One nice thing about creating overhead animations is at any point I can decide to change the story, which I do. Very rarely do I change it dramatically. Even just changing nuances keeps it fresh for me…My hope, as always, is that people take something away from the experience of seeing my work. And I’m not real fussy about what that experience is.”

No One Helped Me will take place at 7:30pm on Wed October 22 at Gatineau’s Daimon.

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