From Sharne Wolff…
At the 17th Biennale of Sydney in 2010, Daniel Crooks’ showed his unforgettable video Static No.12 (seek stillness in movement) on Cockatoo Island. The video showed the graceful and elongated slow motion movements of a Chinese man performing tai chi in a Shanghai street. Crooks was able to manipulate screen time to reveal an aesthetic beauty and ‘way in’ for the viewer to enter the subject’s spiritual world.
This idea of a portal to parallel universes has been evident in many of Crooks’ videos and in remapping, the artist has continued to shoot live sequences, later distorting and slicing the sequences to create an awareness of different dimensions. The dynamic city landscape of Tokyo features in Static No.19 (shibuya rorschach) and Train No.10 (onward backwards) while Cloud Atlas (fitzroy) gazes toward the sky from a moving car in the streets of Melbourne – turning our normal method of mapping the landscape by landmarks and street signs literally on its head.
In the days of DIY photoshopping techniques and portraits painted from photographs, images are produced with the aid of technology rather than time spent with the subject. For each of his portraits, Crooks spends time taking multiple images from many perspectives determined via a grid. He then splices them into a single portrait and produces an abstract version of reality. Perhaps that’s all we ever see.
Until 29 September.
Anna Schwartz Gallery, Darlington.
Pic: ‘Train No.10 (onward backwards)’ 2012 Single-channel High Definition digital video 16:9, colour, sound, 7 minutes 20 seconds. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney.
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