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Introducing: Daniel Crooks
We are thrilled to welcome esteemed multidisciplinary artist Daniel Crooks to the Sullivan+Strumpf artist stable. Aotearoa-born and Naarm/Melbournebased, Crooks is an innovator in the field of moving-image, photography and installation. Daniel will have his first solo exhibition with us at our Eora/Sydney gallery in March, 2024.
By Oliver Todd, Artist Liaison and Gallery Assistant
For over thirty years, Daniel Crooks has questioned our understandings of time and motion, carrying audiences through space, and altering perceptions of reality. Over this time, Crooks has developed a distinct visual language, completely unique to his practice, one that moves solidstate to something far more mercurial. His multidisciplinary practise - spanning video, photography, sculpture, and installation – has established him as leading authority in the moving image field and contemporary art.
Static No.12 (seek stillness in movement) [2009], first premiered at the 17th Biennale of Sydney in 2010, is an example of his iconic ‘time-slice’ work that Crooks is best known for; a term coined by the artist to describe his digital video and photographic works that manipulate time, image and motion. He uses multiple cameras and editing techniques to select small segments of images, which are then warped and recombined across the screen. The results are mesmerizing deviations from the linear and the absolute, depictions of motion that are released from their time-space constraints, creating alternate and fluid realities.
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A more recent work, Boundary Conditions (2022), was a major commission by Museums of History NSW, displayed on a monolithic screen in the forecourts of the Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney. Using historic sites, Crooks utilised precision robotic motion control and advanced post-production techniques to create a rolling tapestry of combine footage, inviting audiences to reconsider their internal models of time and space, speaking to the precarious liminality of our contemporary movement.
Crooks is a master of his medium, maintaining a dynamism and agility in his approach, constantly engaging with and employing new digital technologies. Drawing on his studies in animation at the Victorian College of Arts, Victoria, and further post-graduate research at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, his practice is constantly evolving, yet maintaining his unmistakeable visual language.
As a new generation of artists enter the digital sphere, Crooks stands out as a pioneer, continuing a practice exploring and investigating new technologies that push against the limits of the moving image.
Major recent public projects include Structured Light, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2022; Water Clocks, 2022, Murdoch University, Perth; and Phantom Ride, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 2016. Daniel Crooks’ works are also included in significant international collections and institutions including National Gallery of Gallery, Canberra; M+/Museum of Visual Culture, Hong Kong; Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne; Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and the Chartwell Collection, Auckland.
