AustLit

Daniel Crooks was born and educated in New Zealand, completing a Bachelor of Graphic Design at the Auckland Institute of Technology before relocating to Australia to pursue postgraduate studies at the Victorian College of the Arts School of Film and TV where he received a Diploma of Animation. In 1994 he founded the Dimensional Laboratories media studio, and has since lectured at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Monash University in Melbourne, and worked as a motion graphics designer at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

A prolific artist, he has a significant local and international profile. His work has featured in copious group and solo exhibitions in Australia and New Zealand as well as across the globe, having completing residencies in London, Amsterdam and Tokyo. He has been commissioned for numerous public art projects in Australia.

His technical education and fascination with movement is highly evident in his art practice.

Crooks works primarily in video and digital media. His works are characterized by the treatment of time as a spatial dimension, as a metaphysical material able to be constructed and manipulated.

He employs a technique in many of his works whereby fragments of film or photographic images are extracted from the whole and then recombined using temporal and spatial displacement, creating a distorted, abstracted version of the original.

He uses cutting-edge digital and mechanical technology to capture and then dissect the technical aspects of visual composition and linear time structures, creating organic, free-form images that exist in a unique spatio-temporal dimension.

His use of digital media forms encourages a shift in the perception of movement, by exaggerating the spatio-temporal relationship between motion and our experience of it. By eliminating the notion of immediacy, Crooks encouraging new fields of interaction with and perception of time, space and motion.

Daniel Crooks uses digital video and photography to explore the relationship between time and movement. His work is informed by the motion analysis work of Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, whose nineteenth-century studies of human physiology and fitness training were instrumental in forming modern concepts of exercise. The technological manipulations produced by Crooks trigger in the viewer a perceptual shift; they are at once aesthetically and intellectually intriguing.

— Sellers Art Prize

Daniel Crooks http://www.danielcrooks.com

Anna Shwartz Gallery http://www.annaschwartzgallery.com/works