Daniel Crooks
remap­ping

Daniel Crooks’ ​‘remap­ping’ sug­gests views of oth­er pos­si­ble worlds. In video and pho­tog­ra­phy, Crooks records, dis­sects, and recon­fig­ures sec­tions of lived reality.

Cloud Atlas (fitzroy 1:23) traces the tran­sient, intan­gi­ble mate­r­i­al of the sky. Bor­row­ing the title from David Mitchell’s Book­er Prize-nom­i­nat­ed nov­el, the artist attempts to chart phys­i­cal space by trav­el­ling a pre-deter­mined path on the ground by car. Our point-of-view is desta­bilised by the sim­ple manip­u­la­tion of the cam­era shoot­ing direct­ly up, into the sky. Unable to nav­i­gate by the roads or street signs, we can only track the artist’s move­ment by land­marks in the air – bare trees, the roofs of build­ings, elec­tric­i­ty cables and the recog­nis­able Vic­to­ri­an tow­er of the Fitzroy Town Hall. Reflect­ing our attempts to describe and nav­i­gate the world with rigid sys­tems, Crooks reminds us that our own real­i­ties are con­sti­tut­ed through perception.

In Pan No.10 (nei­ther here nor there), the artist links dis­con­tin­u­ous loca­tions and tem­po­ral­i­ties into an alter­na­tive whole. A fur­ther devel­op­ment from the inves­ti­ga­tions of his work A Gar­den of Par­al­lel Paths, which was com­mis­sioned for the 2012 Ade­laide Bien­ni­al, this work sees dis­parate spaces col­lid­ing at right-angles, cre­at­ing a series of vir­tu­al cross-roads where peo­ple and mov­ing objects inter­sect, merge momen­tar­i­ly, and dis­ap­pear. As the ​‘real’ space of the video becomes increas­ing­ly frac­tured over time, the glitch­es and blurred edges become sites of pos­si­bil­i­ty and intrigue. Like the edges of clouds, mat­ter dis­pers­es across space and hints at dimen­sions oth­er than those per­ceived to be real.

The mate­ri­al­i­ty of time con­stant­ly asserts itself in Daniel Crooks’ videos, and in Train No.10 (onward back­wards) the artist returns to the vehi­cle which has so often been evoked to describe con­scious­ness, lin­ear time, and rel­a­tiv­i­ty. Util­is­ing a Tokyo mono­rail as a large-scale track­ing device for his cam­era, Crooks again blurs the dis­tinc­tion between time and space, dis­plac­ing the ​‘place’ of a small sec­tion of footage so that it appears to occur as a thread of dura­tion. Draw­ing on the inter­twined cul­tur­al his­to­ries of cin­e­ma and loco­mo­tion, Crooks places the view­er inside motion, recall­ing the Lumière broth­ers’ L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare de la Ciotat.

Else­where in Tokyo, Sta­t­ic No.19 (shibuya rorschach) is locat­ed in the street, where the fre­net­ic life of the intense city moves with a unusu­al­ly delayed and grace­ful motion. Stand­ing still, a sin­gle drifter presents him­self to Crooks and the cam­era rig. Despite his appar­ent acknowl­edge­ment of the crowd rush­ing past, he remains sep­a­rate, cap­tur­ing the artist by stay­ing as sta­t­ic as the cam­era. This sole pro­tag­o­nist is social­ly iso­lat­ed, but here appears to stake out his own loca­tion in time; the footage is slowed to a pace at which he alone moves and sees.

The Por­trait series of pho­tographs artic­u­lates the artist’s inter­est in a tem­po­ral rather than a phys­i­cal image of life. Each work is the study of a sin­gle per­son over a peri­od of about twen­ty min­utes. The video cam­era is mount­ed on a ​‘robot’ which fol­lows a Hamil­ton­ian path sim­i­lar to that fol­lowed by the artist in Cloud Atlas. It moves around the pre­set frame of the shot, trav­el­ling along a line which draws the ver­tices of a graph, vis­it­ing every point on the graph once only. The cam­era fol­lows this line, begin­ning at one point and end­ing at anoth­er, and nev­er cross­es a point twice. Rem­i­nis­cent of Chuck Close’s grid­ded self-por­traits, as well as the sur­veil­lance and mon­i­tor­ing tech­nol­o­gy used in reti­na scan­ning, these works do not enter into the per­son­al­i­ty or ​‘essence’ of their sub­jects, rather, they express the inabil­i­ty of the pho­to­graph­ic image to pro­vide a com­pre­hen­sive, indis­putable ver­sion of the world. They are both tem­po­ral and phys­i­cal por­traits, an index­i­cal trace of the time the artist spent with the subject.

The result of Daniel Crook’s con­tin­ued fas­ci­na­tion with the phys­i­cal prop­er­ties of time, ​‘remap­ping’ is imbued with the rigour of math­e­mat­ics and the gen­tle meta­physics of pho­tog­ra­phy and the mov­ing image. Remain­ing salient is the ​‘con­crete’ mate­r­i­al of these ethe­re­al, desta­bil­is­ing works: all that we view has actu­al­ly occurred, and was sim­ply doc­u­ment­ed by the artist. Noth­ing is cut or removed, only dis­placed in the sequence of time, enough to now offer a view from the wings of a usu­al­ly assumed reality.