Inhabiting the edges: Daniel Crooks’s 'Boundary Conditions'
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Try watching Boundary Conditions in the rain. Daniel Crooks’s large-scale video commission for Sydney Living Museums (SLM), which floats on a 7 by 9-metre LED screen in front of the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Hyde Park Barracks, almost reaching Francis Greenway’s 1819 clock, offers a richly textured visual and aural experience that is only enhanced by the elements. Indeed, fluidity is the artwork’s masterstroke. The Hastings, New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based artist’s gliding motion-control camera ushers viewers through a slow moving montage of footage filmed at SLM’s various heritage sites across Sydney. Much of Boundary Conditions was, in fact, filmed during Sydney’s torrential rains earlier this year. ‘Driving from the Parramatta Female Factory to Rose Seidler House,’ recalls Crooks, ‘the rain was so heavy the car was going 20 kilometres [an hour], which didn’t bode very well for our external shots, but we got there. There are some pockets of sun.’
The artist’s decision to shoot closer and tighter has borne fruit. Fishbone ferns are seen sprouting from masonry, moss glistens between brickwork, and sandstone walls weep. At Rose Seidler House, a giant monstera plant threatens to turn the modernist lounge room into a greenhouse. This sense of nature taking over Sydney’s heritage sites is for the most part a poetic interpretation. In footage elsewhere, the heavily draped interiors of Vaucluse House and the handwritten paper files of the State Archives remain thankfully dry. However, rendered in Crooks’s signature ‘time-slice’ style, which digitally knits together footage in a seamless, scrolling mise en scène, what is inside becomes outside (and vice versa), and what is distant becomes staggeringly close-up in a constantly shifting game of perception, dissolving between surface and depth.
Watching Boundary Conditions also reminded me of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope, a murder thriller that takes place in real time, stitched together in 10-minute segments to appear as one long take. Like Hitchcock, Crooks revels in the artistry of presenting a sustained bravura moment, even if Boundary Conditions contains no murder scene as such. Though perhaps it points to a different sort of crime – that of omission: how so much of Sydney’s architectural past hasn’t been so immaculately preserved or documented.
Michael Fitzgerald, Sydney
The third in a series of annual art commissions by Sydney Living Museums, Daniel Crooks’s Boundary Conditions is currently being screened at Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney, until 31 July 2022.
