Sound and Music: Byron Scullin
Block Universe takes the Escher-like qualities of the internal stairwell at Brisbane Girls Grammar as a conceptual departure point. This architectural site, its layered sight lines, shifting perspectives, and recursive geometry, becomes a framework for exploring complex systems and visual paradoxes.
Drawing inspiration from fields as diverse as imaginary architecture, cellular automata, protein folding, the block universe theory, labyrinthine structures, drawing machines, integrated circuit design, perspective theory and art history, the project weaves together scientific logic and visual speculation.
At the heart of the work is a study in perception: using the original architectural model of the stairwell, I have experimented with virtual camera placement, composition and overlapping concurrent fields of view that are then reimposed on the real world with a real camera. Merging multiple perspectives and playing with discontinuities in time and space, the final work appears at once seamless, coherent and yet manifestly impossible.
Daniel Crooks
A pre-eminent figure and authority in his field, Daniel Crooks has spent his career crafting a distinct visual language unique to his practice. Working predominantly in video, photography and sculpture, Crooks is preoccupied with time and motion in an altered state.
Crooks is a careful observer of the everyday through a lens that splinters and refracts. His treatment of time is non-linear, pliable and warped. Within Crooks’s video work, our perception of space does not remain in a solid-state. Like many scientists and philosophers, Crooks is fascinated by the potential of a fourth dimension to the human existence. His works are a suggestion of what it might be like to experience the world beyond three spatial dimensions with a fourth dimension that is temporal: the dimension of time.
Crooks’s technique is the result of rigorous exploration and experimentation throughout his career, with the artist repeatedly examining and altering the same subject matter through new perspectives.
His recent public projects include Boundary Conditions, Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney, 2022; Structured Light, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2022; Water Clocks, 2022, Murdoch University, Perth; and Phantom Ride, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 2016.
Daniel Crooks’s works are included in significant international collections and institutions including National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; M+/Museum of Visual Culture, Hong Kong; Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne; Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and the Chartwell Collection, Auckland.