This month the Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art will be filled with the digital work of Daniel Crooks as part of the Art and the Moving Image program of this year’s Adelaide Film Festival.
This month the Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art will be filled with the digital work of Daniel Crooks as part of the Art and the Moving Image program of this year’s Adelaide Film Festival. The main component of the exhibition is a site specific work supported by the Adelaide Film Festival Fund and Samstag. “For me I guess a commission like this is a really great opportunity to try something out and to work on a slightly more ambitious scale,” says Crooks. The work includes five screens, which will appear as one, concertinaed or folded into the space. Curator Gillian Brown: “Through these folds we will be able to get a sense of the real medium. Crooks’ medium is time itself. He is not just looking at the screen as a way of exploring something. He is really harnessing that and trying to pull something from it.” Crooks adds, “It’s not really a sculptural thing but it has much more physical presence in the space than just being a picture or moving image on the wall.” Occupying a large area downstairs means the audience will be able to walk around the work extending the content of the video beyond the frame. “The real hope is that people will get a much stronger bodily sense of it by being able to move and navigate around the screen. They will get a sense of the actual dimensional boundary that is going on in the work,” explains Crooks. Much of Crooks’ works focuses on time and Brown says the new work “will be following that strand he has been working at where people are slipping in and out of time. Using the fold structure we will be able to follow that ourselves and get a real physical sense of time as he handles it.” Crooks adds, “Time is really my main material. I treat it as a physical medium and try to make it tangible and malleable. It’s all very time based and time consuming.” Upstairs will include a number of works by Crooks in what he describes as a little micro mini survey. The exhibition will include early works like Train #1 which has been reconfigured. “It is going to be across more screens than it ever has before. It will be quite a long installation. It’s a new rendition of an old work,” says Brown. The exhibition is an opportunity for audiences to experience video work in the way it was intended. Crooks says, “You will get to see it on a really nice screen with big sound, in a dark space at full resolution, at full playback sound rate, the way it should be experienced – an actual art experience as opposed to a laptop/ YouTube experience.” Daniel Crooks Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art Thursday, October 10 to Friday, December 20 adelaidefilmfestival.org 1. Daniel Crooks Static No.19 (shibuya rorschach) 2.Daniel Crooks 2009 Static No12
