Daniel Crooks: remapping
Portraits taken by programmed cameras and exquisitely sensitive video meditations on the experience of time and perception.
Overview
Shaun Gladwell reference? Okay, Shaun Gladwell reference: they are represented by the same gallery and sometimes pop up in the same place and they both make video art that deals with the human body and its navigation of the world and experience of time. That being covered, and the "Where do I recognise that name and style from?" feeling being narrowed down to "Oh, probably the Marking Time show at the MCA!" let's get to the important part: is it any good, and does it look cool?
This warrants a yes and a yes, in my opinion, for both the video works covering one side of the gallery and the photomedia portraits that occupy the other and the back wall. But yeses of differing emphases. Oh and that one graphic print in the entryway is nice too, but while I don't object, per se, to its presence there and can see its relation to the show, it felt a little superfluous.
First up, the portraits, taken using a process that involves a video camera mounted on a robot following a Hamiltonian path within a pre-defined frame (I paraphrase this from the admirably detailed information the gallery provides in the catalogue). There are seven in 130 x 130cm format, each given first names presumably of their subjects, and a 400 x 400cm self-portrait looms at one end of the cavernous gallery space, with its line of sight surveying at once the others and the room at large. This encompassing gaze is effected not just by size but the diffracted composition of the images, wherein the heads of the subjects are made up of excerpts from different shots the camera has taken during its 20 minute observation of each subject.
The effect is of a sort of Cubism for the era of the retina scan. It's interesting because it's clever and because faces always are. But to me — and this is no doubt partially a result of my immense technological ignorance — there was also somehow the feeling that this is more something that fits in a slideshow on a tech website than an art gallery. The scale and physical presence of the works as tangible objects made the consciousness of the complexity of their creation feel more like a design experiment than an investigation into ways of seeing.
Almost the opposite is true of the video works, the sheer beauty of which almost prevent appreciation of the virtuosity of the means with which they've been captured. Crooks' videos are progress with hypnotic cyclicality at micro and macro level. Each movement, whether of a body captured by the still camera or the camera moving through the world, unfolds in a way that measures the passage of time in increments of that particular movement, creating a meditative sense of inevitability that is underscored by the presentation of each work on loop. From viewpoints of a crowded station, from the back of a train, pointed at the sky, and panning across spliced-together street views, these videos are - it is kind of gross to say it but I am going to - poetic invocations of the beauty of the experience of time.
So, worth a look.
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