Daniel Crooks: Seek Stillness in Movement

Daniel Crooks Static No.12 (seek stillness in movement) (detail) 2009–10. High Definition digital video. Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

Daniel Crooks Static No.12 (seek stillness in movement) (detail) 2009–10. High definition digital video. Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

This exhibition is now closed

Hectic city scenes transformed into contemplative meditations of extraordinary beauty.

Hectic city scenes are transformed into contemplative, time-bending meditations of extraordinary beauty in the hands of celebrated Melbourne-based video artist Daniel Crooks. Four remarkable works, all created using Crooks's distinctive 'time-slicing' technique, stretch and fragment everyday sights, disrupting not only our visual experience, but our perception of time itself. The centrepiece of the exhibition is the spell-binding Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement), which features an elderly man practicing tai chi in Shanghai's Xujiahui Park. Celebrating the slow physical poetry of that discipline, Crooks turns an intimate, 'ordinary' moment into a powerful, complex contemplation on the movement of the body through space and time.

Date:
5 April – 2 June 2014
Exhibition number:
966

Collection works in this exhibition

1 item

Pan No.2 (one step forwards, one frame backwards)

Daniel Crooks

Related reading: Outer Spaces

Exhibition

Daniel Crooks: Everywhere Instantly

18 July – 9 November 2008

'Once you've seen a Daniel Crooks DVD you're not likely to forget the experience,' writes art critic Edward Colless. Using his renowned 'time-slice' technique, New Zealand-born Crooks transforms everyday sights such as trains and city streets into wide-screen meditations on time and motion. Everywhere instantly brings these dizzying and beautiful digital worlds to New Zealand audiences for the first time.

Article

Seeking stillness in movement

Time didn't feel like it was on my side on the day I first saw Daniel Crooks's film Static No.12 (seek stillness in movement) (2009–10). In Sydney for just a couple of days to see the Biennale, I'd committed the cardinal mistake of the international art tourist and bitten off more culture than I had time to chew. By the time I reached Cockatoo Island and its dozens of exhibits, I was suffering from what might be called the Grumpiness of the Long-Distance Art Watcher – a state in which one doesn't absorb the artworks so much as check them off, feeling simultaneously fretful about my dwindling time and resentful about the sheer quantity of art. Though I hardly knew it then, this was the perfect state in which to test Crooks's video – a work that attempts, like no other I know, to induce an altered sense of time.

Continued