Art Metropole

Daniel Barrow is a draftsperson who works in video, performance and installation. He is best known for his intricate, live, manual animations on overhead projectors, which deal with themes of fantasy, empathy, isolation and queerness. A graduate of the University of Manitoba in 1995, Barrow began experimenting with overhead projectors after appreciating the lecture style of one of his professors. An important early overhead-projector work was 2002’s The Face of Everything, inspired by the bizarre story of Liberace’s long-time partner. Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry, from 2008, was a breakthrough work; Barrow toured it internationally through 2011. In 2010, Barrow won the Sobey Art Award, and earlier that year he opened Emotional Feelings at Toronto’s Art Gallery of York University. Barrow has performed internationally at venues such as PS1, the Walker Art Center and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

Allyson Mitchell is a maximalist artist working in sculpture, performance, installation and film. Her practice melds feminism and pop culture to investigate contemporary ideas about sexuality, autobiography and the body, largely through the use of reclaimed textile and abandoned craft. These articulations have resulted in a coven of lesbian feminist Sasquatch monsters, a room-sized Vagina Dentata, an army of super genius Holly Hobbies and a woodland utopic library complete with a wishing well of forbidden political knowledge.

Her works have exhibited in galleries and festivals across Canada, the US and Europe, including Tate Modern, the Textile Museum of Canada, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, the Andy Warhol Museum, Walker Art Center, The British Film Institute, Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

A survey of Mitchell’s “hand made” animated film and video work recently toured festivals and performance spaces internationally with exhibitions in Dublin, London and Bologna. Until their retirement in 2004, Mitchell also performed actively with the fat performance troupe ‘Pretty Porky and Pissed Off’, which she co-founded in 1997.

Deep Lez, Mitchell’s ongoing aesthetic/political project advocating a strategic return to the herstories of radical and lesbian feminisms, has been the subject of dialogue within queer and trans communities in recent years. This ethic has caused a stir with activists and artists alike in a range of venues from living room potlucks and academic conferences to public galleries and museums.

Mitchell recently attended the Canada Council for the Arts International Studio (ISCP) in New York City. She is based in Toronto, where she is an Assistant Professor in the School of Women’s Studies at York University. She is represented by Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects and she runs FAG Feminist Art Gallery with Deirdre Logue.