Daniel Crooks returns to mesmerise Christchurch audiences

31 March, 2014

Daniel Crooks returns to mesmerise Christchurch audiences

Celebrated New Zealand-born video artist Daniel Crooks’ time-bending meditations on reality are returning to a screen near you in Christchurch.

From 5 April, Christchurch Art Gallery will exhibit four of Crooks’ remarkable digital works — all created using his distinctive “time-slicing” technique — which stretch and fragment urban scenes and everyday sights.

This is the second time that Crooks’ works have been shown in Christchurch, following his highly acclaimed solo exhibition, everywhere instantly, at Christchurch Art Gallery in 2008.

The centrepiece of his latest exhibition is the spellbinding Static No.12 (seek stillness in movement), which features an elderly man practicing t’ai chi in Shanghai’s Xujiahui Park.

Celebrating the slow, physical poetry of that discipline, Crooks turns an intimate, everyday moment into a powerful contemplation on the movement of the body through space and time.

Christchurch Art Gallery Director Jenny Harper says it is Crooks’ ability to reorder reality that resonates with audiences.

“Through his mesmerising digital works, Daniel Crooks wields an incredible power — the power to make people stop and think.

“He takes what we recognise as being familiar or reality, and then he warps and reorients it, so that all you can do is be hypnotised by what’s happening right in front of you.

“The exhibition, Seek Stillness in Movement, will offer viewers a thought-provoking take on urban existence, as well as an oasis amidst the bustle of the rebuild,” she says.

Born in Hastings in 1973 and now based in Melbourne, Daniel Crooks is a graduate of the Auckland Institute of Technology and the Victorian College of the Arts School of Film and Television.

In 1997, he received an Australia Council Fellowship to research motion control at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

Crooks’ works have appeared in significant exhibitions in Australia — including Melbourne Now at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2013–14 and Primavera 2003 at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art — and in Europe, the UK, the United States and Asia. Last year, a major survey of his work was presented at the Samstag Museum of Art, in Adelaide.

Seek Stillness in Movement will be at Christchurch Art Gallery’s temporary exhibition space, 209 Tuam Street, Christchurch, from 5 April to 2 June. Entry is free of charge.

Opening times: 10am–5pm, Monday to Friday, and 10am–4pm, Saturday and Sunday.

ENDS

© Scoop Media