DANIEL CROOKS

Born 1973 in Hastings, New Zealand. Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.

Daniel Crooks, Static No.12 (seek stillness in movement), 2009-10 (video still), HD video (RED transferred to Blu-ray), dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery Copyright © Daniel Crooks 2009

Born in Hastings, New Zealand, Daniel Crooks was raised in Auckland where he studied design at the Auckland Institute of Technology. He became interested in moving images and studied animation at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne in 1994. In 1997, Crooks received an Australia Council Fellowship to research motion control at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and began to experiment with non-linear representations of time; a six-month period of study that set him on course to develop his signature ‘time-slice’ series of works.

Crooks’ ‘time-slice’ videos and photo projects since 1999 manipulate the elements of digital video and imagery, breaking up flows of real time and space experienced in conventional film and video media into fluid and reassembled presentations of the surrounding world. A ‘slice’ of an image or frame of a video is selected by the artist, stretched and spread across the screen, so that people in their environments unexpectedly pause and warp, flatten and sprawl in a lush digital sweep of shifting pixels. While distorting elements of the pictorial scene, Crooks tethers his treated images to indexical reality – anchoring his altered subjects to static elements and untreated footage. The familiar world of pedestrians, cars, trains and elevators, the humdrum traffic of the everyday, transmogrify into wildly organic deviations from the way we experience the passing of time, and our daily routines. Depth of field flattens and objects are alternately freed and coerced into their viscous movements on the screen.

In Static no. 11 (running man) (2008), for which he won the inaugural Basil Sellers Art Prize, the body and movement of a man running on a treadmill is altered while his background surrounds remain static, until the ground beneath begins to break apart. In slow motion, limbs and torso appear to separate from each other, pulling away from against the limits of the body and contracting again with hypnotic and mesmeric motion, slowing down until the form freezes and is eventually erased. In such works, Crooks presents an alternative model of how we see the world, akin to the fantastic special effects of pioneer filmmakers the Lumière Brothers or to the efforts of Cubist painters to render different perspectives simultaneously on a two-dimensional plane.

Crooks premieres a new video at the 17th Biennale of Sydney on Cockatoo Island, Static No.12 (seek stillness in movement), which takes as its subject the slow and graceful movements a man he filmed randomly taking tai chi exercise in a Shanghai park. Crooks’ study of this gentle martial art is a meditation on the movements themselves, and the sequence of tai chi forms appears and disappears in a molten assemblage of attenuated body parts. The body’s movement spreads horizontally across the frame and the viewer is astonishingly privy to the entire span of the practitioner’s compelling routine, all at once, compressed into single moments and expanded across time.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2008 ‘Intersection’, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, Australia
2008 ‘Everywhere Instantly’, Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand
2006 ‘Daniel Crooks’, REMO, Osaka, Japan
2005 ‘Daniel Crooks: Train No.1’, Level 2 Projects Space, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
2005 ‘2 videos & 2 devices’, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009 ‘Cubism’, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Australia
2008 ‘Basil Sellers Art Prize’ (winner), Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia
2008 ‘Figuring Landscapes’, Tate Modern, London, UK (travelling exhibition)
2006 ‘Anne Landa Award’, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
2003 ‘Primavera 2003’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia

Selected Bibliography

Nicholas Chambers, ‘Thoughts on Duration in ‘On Perspective and Motion (part 2)’, Anne Landa Award, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2006, pp. 16–21
Edward Colless, ‘Time Lord’, Australian Art Collector, issue 40, April–June 2007, pp. 134–43
Charles Green (ed.), 2004: Australian Culture Now, exhibition catalogue, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (AC MI) and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2004, p. 124
Justin Paton (ed.), Daniel Crooks: everywhere instantly, Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, 2008
Russell Storer, ‘Daniel Crooks’, Untitled. Portraits of Australian Artists, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2007