Daniel Crooks
Par­a­bol­ic

For his fifth solo exhi­bi­tion at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Daniel Crooks has cre­at­ed a series of new works that high­lights the phys­i­cal prop­er­ties of time man­i­fest­ed through the math­e­mat­i­cal and dig­i­tal stud­ies of sine waves and parabolas.

In ​‘Par­a­bol­ic’, Crooks focus­es on the cycli­cal nature of time, rotat­ing it on its axis and achiev­ing a depth and motion unprece­dent­ed in the mov­ing image. Across four sin­gle chan­nel videos, Crooks con­structs a panora­ma of his cities of predilec­tion, Hong Kong and Mel­bourne. This inter­est in rep­re­sent­ing time as a helix has guid­ed the artist’s cam­era to focus on the revolv­ing entrance doors of Melbourne’s high-rise build­ings. A sur­re­al por­trait emerges from record­ing and abstract­ing the ever spin­ning flow of fig­ures as they advance through these pro­pellers of cor­po­rate life.

A lead­ing fig­ure in video art since the 1990’s, Crooks has long been fas­ci­nat­ed with expand­ing the con­ven­tions of the lin­ear per­cep­tion of time in the mov­ing image. He has explored the means by which an image may be stretched across time and space, slic­ing it into pix­els and lay­er­ing these into com­plex col­lages. As Kat­ri­na Sedg­wick, Direc­tor of the Aus­tralian Cen­tre for Mov­ing Image, not­ed: ​‘Since his ground­break­ing video Train No.1 (2002), Daniel Crooks has been­cre­at­ing pho­to­graph­ic and video works that probe our under­stand­ing of time and visu­al per­cep­tion. His intri­cate manip­u­la­tions of time and space com­pel us to look at our world anew and re-exam­ine our expe­ri­ence of real­i­ty. Crooks’ uniqueper­spec­tive and sin­gu­lar aes­thet­ic have cement­ed his posi­tion as one of Australia’s lead­ing con­tem­po­rary video artists.’

1. Kat­ri­na Sedg­wick in Daniel Crooks: Phan­tom Ride, Ian Pot­ter Mov­ing Image Com­mis­sion. Mel­bourne: Aus­tralian Cen­tre for Mov­ing Image Pub­li­ca­tions, 2016.