Overview
You could say Daniel Crooks is a kind of documentary artist, as his source is always the world around him. However, the world he presents is not the one we're used to seeing. In his latest exhibition, Crooks exposes the inability of the photographic image to provide a comprehensive, indisputable version of the world.
As part of the Auckland Festival of Photography, Two Rooms presents Daniel Crooks: Remapping. The exhibition combines a series of photographic portraits and a recent video work, Cloud Atlas (fitzroy 1:23). The Portraits series references the long tradition of portraiture in photography, but undoes it at the same time. Using special equipment akin to retina scanning equipment, Crooks creates portraits which are temporal and physical. Rather than expressing the personality of the subject, the portraits are an indexical trace of the time the artist spent with the subject.
Cloud Atlas (fitzroy 1:23) is again an exploration into the mapping of time and space. Borrowing the title from David Mitchell’s Booker Prize-nominated novel, Crooks charts physical space by travelling a pre-determined path on the ground by car. Our point-of-view is destabilised by the simple manipulation of the camera shooting directly up.
Daniel Crooks is interested in time and how we experience it. Crooks explores visual representations of passing time and presents us with intriguing new versions of reality. Working with his own videos and photographs, Crooks recombines the visual information he collects. The most beguiling thing is that nothing is removed, simply reordered or displaced in the temporal order we are accustomed to. The result is an interpretation of reality, but unlike anything you've seen before.