Daniel Crooks

For this exhi­bi­tion, four new video works by Daniel Crooks address the artist’s con­tin­u­ing engage­ment with time as a tan­gi­ble, phys­i­cal and ulti­mate­ly mal­leable material.

In this series, Crooks con­tin­ues his rela­tion­ship with the city of Shang­hai, which began with an impor­tant cor­po­rate com­mis­sion in 2009, and was most recent­ly extend­ed in the Syd­ney Bien­nale project, Sta­t­ic No.12 (seek still­ness in move­ment), 2010.

In Sta­t­ic No.14 (com­po­si­tion for neon), 2010, we are trans­port­ed to the icon­ic East Nan­jing Road to wit­ness a spec­tac­u­lar com­po­si­tion of neon signs, abstract­ed through Crooks’ appre­hen­sions of altered video time. Cap­tured and processed in this way, Crooks forms a vir­tu­al col­lab­o­ra­tion with the absent pro­gram­mers of the signs, bring­ing to light a sym­phon­ic arrange­ment that would oth­er­wise remain unno­ticed, unac­knowl­edged, even by the com­posers themselves.

In con­trast, Sta­t­ic No.13 (under­wa­ter flight record­ing), 2010, mus­es on a float­ing red kite in the tran­quil set­ting of Peo­ple’s Square. Visu­al­ly rem­i­nis­cent of Chi­nese cal­lig­ra­phy the video is min­i­mal in both aes­thet­ic and move­ment, and with­out the dis­tort­ed pas­sage of fig­ures through space that is com­mon to many of the artist’s videos, this work presents a flu­id yet high­ly vis­cous view of time.

Sta­t­ic No.16 (fish­er-yates shuf­fle), 2010, explores the notion of post phys­i­cal con­scious­ness, and our abil­i­ty to recon­struct and make sense of infor­ma­tion that is scat­tered and ran­dom­ly processed. In this work Crooks’ inter­est in alter­na­tive spa­tio-tem­po­ral rep­re­sen­ta­tions is illus­trat­ed phys­i­cal­ly in what appears to be a recon­fig­u­ra­tion of the frame as a col­lage. How­ev­er on clos­er inves­ti­ga­tion what is per­ceived is actu­al­ly a sin­gle frame shuf­fled in space. The final result is dis­or­gan­ised yet strange­ly coher­ent; a non­lin­ear pro­gres­sion of move­ment, that para­dox­i­cal­ly becomes more com­plex through its sim­ple reformation.

Final­ly, we return to Crooks’ fas­ci­na­tion with the rail­way in Pan No.7 (strange attrac­tor), 2010. In this work, as in the entire series of ​‘pans’ we observe the move­ment of human traf­fic through a dis­tor­tion that sus­pends the land­scape and fig­ures in time, elon­gat­ing forms and sim­pli­fy­ing the back­ground until it becomes pure geo­met­ric abstrac­tion. The work is qui­et, grace­ful and con­tem­pla­tive, a con­tra­dic­tion of the site in which it is sit­u­at­ed. In this sense, as with all of Crooks’ videos, we reflect on the world around us with new insight.