For Immediate Release
March, 2003

The Walter Phillips Gallery brings a segment of the current exhibition Super Modern World of Beauty, curated by Calgary independent curator Diana Sherlock, to the Alberta College of Art & Design next week to stage a production of Daniel Barrow’s The Face of Everything. Daniel Barrow will also do an artist's talk at the Walter Phillips Gallery on Saturday, April 5 at 2 p.m. Admission to the performance and the talk are free.

This must-see performance of The Face of Everything takes place on Friday, April 4th at 7 p.m. in the Alberta College of Art & Design's Stanford Perrott Lecture Theatre. Since 1993, Barrow has used an overhead projector to create and adapt comic book narratives to a "manual" form of animation by projecting, layering, and manipulating drawings on mylar transparencies. He refers to this practise as "graphic performance, live illustration, or manual animation".

The Face of Everything is set in Las Vegas in the mid-1970s and tells a story inspired by the life experiences of Liberace's most notorious boyfriend. The performance unfolds in the form of visual and emotional cartoon vignettes and a live monologue telling the tale of a dejected teenager brought from poverty into a lavish Las Vegas lifestyle. The story reflects on the relationships between beauty and sadness, as well as a romantic view of pain. An original electronic score composed by Matthew Adam Hart (of the Russian Futurists) accompanies the monologue.

This performance is presented by the Walter Phillips Gallery in conjunction with the Alberta College of Art & Design, and with Mountain Standard Time 2: A City-wide Festival of Performative Art, produced by several Calgary visual arts organizations.

Super Modern World of Beauty is an exhibition that brings together seven contemporary artists working in a variety of media, including performance, drawing, video, installation, digitally animated film, and soft sculpture. Each of these artists revisits the concept of beauty through their examination of desire, empathy, love, romance, nostalgia, and pain. The Walter Phillips Gallery is located in Glyde Hall at The Banff Centre, and is open Tuesday to Sunday from noon to 5 pm. Admission is free.

Click here to view images and to learn more about this exhibition.

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