everywhere instantly

27 June 2008

‘Once you’ve seen a Daniel Crooks DVD you’re not likely to forget the experience,’ writes art critic Edward Colless. ‘Confronting and captivating, these digital video works provide a truly altered perception of the world.’

Christchurch Art Gallery is bringing New Zealand audiences their first ever opportunity to see the work of this New Zealand-born artist in depth. Using his renowned ‘timeslice’ technique, the Melbourne-based artist transforms everyday sights such as trains and city streets into wide-screen meditations on perception, motion, urban life and the speed of life.

Exhibition curator Justin Paton describes Crooks’ art as “creating a world where time warps and billows, slows down and stretches out, fans into a thousand slices, and then ripples back into itself. These days everyone feels as though they have too little time. But Crooks creates videos so mesmerising and strange that we have to make time for them.”

Despite exhibiting throughout Australia and internationally, Crooks’ extraordinary video works have never been screened in his home country. Reaching from a thirteen-metre-wide screening of his mesmerising Train no.1 to the serene recent series Imaginary Objects, the exhibition everywhere instantly will bring eight of these spectacular works to New Zealand audiences.

“We’re very excited to be showing Daniel’s innovative work, and we think it will resonate with other exhibitions in our programme,” says Christchurch Art Gallery Director Jenny Harper.  “Daniel makes unexpected but perfect company for Laurence Aberhart’s photographs, which also evoke a slowed-down experience of time. Together they make up an exciting “time-travelling” season at the Gallery.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated colour catalogue with texts by film critic Adrian Martin; screen scholar Sean Cubitt; Los Angeles Times art critic David Pagel; and science fiction novelist Greg Egan.

Born in Hastings in 1973, Daniel Crooks is a graduate of the Auckland Institute of Technology and the Victorian College of the Arts School of Film and Television. He received an Australia Council Fellowship in 1997 to research motion control at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.  His works have appeared in ‘Primavera 2003’ at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art and exhibitions in Europe, the UK, the United States and Asia.  Crooks has held solo exhibitions at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam; Level 2 Project Space, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (both 2005); and the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2002). He was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam (2004–05) and at the Australia Council Studio, London, UK (2005). His numerous awards include the 2001 City of Stuttgart Prize for Animation and an Australian Short Film Award at the 1996 Sydney International Film Festival. He is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne.

Daniel Crooks: everywhere instantly will be at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu from 18 July until 9 November 2008.

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