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• Artist
  Daniel Crooks
• Title
  Static No.12 (seek stillness in motion)
• Date of Production
  2010
• Medium
  Single-channel High Definition digital video
• Dimensions
  5 minutes 28 seconds, 16:9, colour, stereo
• Credit Details
  Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

PROJECT - Daniel Crooks

Static No.12
(seek stillness in movement)

Project is the Art Gallery of Ballarat's new projection window which will see a curated program of contemporary video works projected into Lydiard Street from dusk to dawn daily. The first Project exhibition is a work by Daniel Crooks, Static No.12 (seek stillness in movement).

Crooks' is best known for his work that explores time and the re-presentation of recorded moments. After the capture of footage, his process involves slicing each frame into thin strips of footage, maybe only a few pixels wide, then with each slice of the frame, stepping back or forward in time. The image is reconstructed by using these slices to put together one frame of footage. A single frame is made up of perhaps hundreds of separate moments of an event. In this way, when viewing his video works you are at any moment seeing the present, future and past all melded together in a familiar but strangely organic and uncontainable world.

Static No 12. takes footage of a man performing tai chi exercise in a Shanghai park. The image is stretched across the screen and the man soon becomes a molten image of movements, body parts, familiar yet unrecognisable, graceful but eerie and uncomfortable. The use of tai chi is especially poignant. Tai chi uses slow movements to train the body and the mind; it is about a sequence of movements in relation to the energy and focus of the individual.  The aim is to slow down the movements and be present in the moment. Static No.12 (seek stillness in movement) is perhaps an insight into the aims of the tai chi practitioner but is also a meditation on the movements themselves.