Daniel Crooks, Index, Melbourne Golden Mile, 2016
Summary
New Zealand–born, Melbourne-based Daniel Crooks is best known for his remarkable digital-video works. These captivating, dreamlike visual streams stretch and manipulate space and time, drawing the viewer into a radically different experience of the world. Each projection dares the viewer to understand the intense plasticity unfolding across the screen, as the work loops back on itself to replay. The subject matter on which the artist trains his lens is often quotidian – an elevator, a commuter train, a tai chi practitioner, city laneways. But Crooks’ skill in slicing, dicing and recalibrating time infuses these everyday subjects with a poetics that invites metaphysical deliberation.
Purchased for the collection in 2008, ‘Elevator 3’ is a single-channel, 4:3 ratio work of 3:52 minutes. It records the rhythm and pathos of a motif of 20th-century urban existence, the elevator. Crooks’ ‘Index’ was commissioned by the City of Melbourne in 2016 as a work that specifically engages with the urban milieu of Melbourne. The network of brass footpath discs that mark the Golden Mile heritage trail drew Crooks across the central city’s surface. This three-channel work of 6:23 minutes, which is played on three portrait-oriented screens, also interpolates images from the collection’s engineering photo-file book. Both works are silent.
