IN CONVERSATION: DANIEL CROOKS

If you're anything like the team at Manuscript, you could spend hours looking at the work of Daniel Crooks, whose inaugural exhibition at Anna Schwartz Gallery in Redfern, Sydney, opens today. Mr Crooks has for the past decade been a leader in video art, with works featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art's recent Marking Time exhibition and the Adelaide Biennial's Parallel Collisions. Like the works featured in those shows, Mr Crooks' photographic and video works manipulate our existing notion of space and time. What makes this show special, beyond seeing the artist's works collectively, is the sheer size of some pieces, with several portraits measuring 4x4 metres in size. We caught the artist for five minutes to discuss his work. 

What is the idea behind Remapping? One of the main threads in my work is the treatment of time as a physical material, so suing the moving image to really look at time as a tangible and malleable medium. My aim is to render the viewer's model of the world a little less concrete. 
What is the process of creation? Everything is shot with a video camera and then processed in the computer. I use off-the-shelf software but also write code to control most aspects of the process. 
Do you have a favourite piece? It depends. Usually the one I'm working on is the least favourite as it'll be causing the most headaches. 
What's next? I'm working towards a large commission next year and also a residency at the FutureLab in Linz.

Daniel Crooks: Remapping opens today at Anna Schwartz Gallery, 245 Wilson Street, Darlington (next to Carriageworks) and runs until September 29. Visit the website for more details. 

Top: Daniel Crooks #9 (Takeshki), 2012, Lambda photographic print; framed, 130x130cm. Above: self portrait.