Major win for visiting artist
Daniel Barrow, visiting artist in Concordia's Department of Studio Arts, has won the $50,000 Sobey Art Award for 2010.
The announcement was made on November 18 during a gala event held at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.
The Sobey Art Award, Canada's pre-eminent award for contemporary Canadian art, was created in 2002 by the Sobey Art Foundation.
It is an annual $50,000 prize given to an artist under 40 who has exhibited in a public or commercial art gallery within 18 months of being nominated.
The Sobey curatorial committee said the vote for Barrow was unanimous: "Over the past 15 years Barrow has created a unique, self-sustaining fictional world. His virtuoso performances awaken a sense of empathy in the viewer. Wry, politically astute, and strangely heartbreaking, his comic narratives address love, loss, gender, and media culture."
The Winnipeg-born artist uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial, and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting.
Since 1993, Barrow has created and adapted comic book narratives to "manual" forms of animation by projecting, layering, and manipulating drawings on overhead projectors. Barrow has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad.
He was the 2007 winner of a Canada Council's Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton award and the 2008 winner of the Images Festival's Images Prize.
Barrow currently teaches two undergraduate courses in the Concordia University Department of Studio Arts Painting and Drawing program and is participating in the Masters in Fine Arts Seminar program as a guest lecturer.
The 2010 Sobey Art Award shortlist exhibition is on view at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal until January 4, 2011.
Related links:
• Concordia's Faculty of Fine Arts
• Daniel Barrow
• Sobey Art Award press release
• 2010 Sobey Art Award shortlist exhibition