Daniel Crooks
Pan No.7 (strange attractor), 2010
digital video, 16:9, colour, stereo sounds, 1 from an edition of 3
with certificate of authenticity signed, dated and inscribed by the artist
Provenance
Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne
Acquired from the above by the present owner on 21 October 2010
Exhibited
stand D10, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne Art Fair, Melbourne, 4-8th August 2010
'Perhaps the most technically distinctive work produced in Australian video art over the past decade has been made by Daniel Crooks. Something of an 'image scientist', Crooks is unusual in his exploration of the materiality of digital imagery. Using his renowned 'timeslice' technique - which involves manipulating slivers of video frames - he transforms everyday sights such as trains and city streets into wide-screen meditations on perception, motion, urbanity and the speed of life.
Objects and people shrink and expand, merge and disappear, and move constantly and rhythmically backwards and forwards simultaneously, yet appear to stay smoothly still against speeding molten backgrounds.' (Daniel Palmer, 'Australian Video Art since 2000' in M Perkins, J Conomos, E Galimberti, A Marsh, S Jones, J Millner, D Tofts & D Palmer, Video Void - Australian Video Art, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2014, p.107)
Image courtesy of the artist and Sullivan & Strumpf, Sydney
New Zealand-born Australian artist Daniel Crooks is a leading video artist and is an important pioneer and innovator in the medium globally. Born in Hastings, New Zealand in 1973, Crooks graduated from the Auckland Institute of Technology before moving to Australia to undertake postgraduate study at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. He currently lives and works in Melbourne.
Crooks began his Time Slice project in 1999. It is the banner under which all of his digital imagery is made and it has introduced a unique element to contemporary video art. Through this ongoing project, Crooks has sought to give audiences a new way of looking at the world and a new, more tangible experience of the phenomenon of time. His videos and still images have aimed to give time physical appearance, weight and presence in motion, with his approach to video art in particular, and its relatively new place in global art practice at the time, being ground-breaking in its perfectionism and simplicity. In describing his intentions with the series, Crooks wrote in his artist statement: "Thin slices are extracted from a moving image stream and then recombined using temporal and spatial displacement...Though inherently digital, the images have the most beautifully organic qualities: images that are at once aesthetically and intellectually intriguing."
In 2016, Crooks was the subject of a major exhibition, Phantom Ride, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (AMCI), Melbourne, and a major survey Daniel Crooks, Samstag Museum of Art and 2013 Adelaide Film Festival, Adelaide, which included the commission of a major 5-channel installation. Other major exhibitions include Bullet Time, City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand (2016); Daniel Crooks: Motion Studies, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2015); The Computational Sublime, Blur + Sharpen, University of Southern California, United States (2005); and Daniel Crooks: Train No. 1, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2005). Crooks has received a number of prestigious awards and grants and his works feature in major public and private collections in Australia and New Zealand.
