MONTREAL.- The Curatorial Panel for the 2010 Sobey Art Award has chosen Daniel Barrow as the recipient of the $50,000 prize. Daniel Barrow represents the Prairies and the North. The announcement was made during a gala event held at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

The other shortlisted artists for this year’s Award were Brendan Lee Satish Tang (West Coast and Yukon), Brendan Fernandes (Ontario), Patrick Bernatchez (Québec), and Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby (Atlantic). Each of these talented artists receives $5,000 in prize money from the Award’s creator, the Sobey Art Foundation.

In commenting on Daniel Barrow’s achievement, the curatorial committee said, “The unanimous choice for the 2010 Sobey Art Award is Daniel Barrow. Over the past 15 years Barrow has created a unique, self-sustaining fictional world composed of drawing, storytelling and manual animation of the antiquated technology of the overhead projector. 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 crux of Barrow’s practice is the problem of how we are all obliged, in order to proceed with our lives, to continually strive to better ourselves and the world around us, in ways misguided or not, transforming the abject into the sublime, heartbreak into redemption.”

The 2010 Sobey Art Award Curatorial Panel consists of: Grant Arnold, Curator, Vancouver Art Gallery; Jen Budney, Associate Curator, Mendel Art Gallery; Philip Monk, Director, Art Gallery of York University; Lesley Johnstone, Curator, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; David Diviney, Curator, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

Since its inception, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia has organized and administered the Sobey Art Award and its accompanying exhibition. Every other year, the Award travels to a gallery or museum outside of Halifax.

The 2010 Sobey Art Award shortlist exhibition is on view at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal until January 4, 2011.

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 prize given to an artist under 40 who has exhibited in a public or commercial art gallery within 18 months of being nominated. A total of $70,000 in prize money is awarded annually; $50,000 to the winner and $5,000 to the other four finalists.

Winnipeg-born and bred artist Daniel Barrow uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial, and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting. Since 1993, he has created and adapted comic book narratives to “manual” forms of animation by projecting, layering, and manipulating drawings on overhead projectors.

Barrow received his BFA in 1995 from the University of Manitoba and has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad. He is the 2007 winner of the Canada Council’s Victor Lartyn Lynch-Staunton award and the 2008 winner of the Images Festival’s Images Prize. Recent exhibitions include solo installations at the Art Gallery of York University (2010) and the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina (2009), a group exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2010), and performances at The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2010) and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2009). Barrow was previously nominated for the Sobey Art Award in 2008.