July/August 08
An Ever Expanding Universe (WA) > WA
Because of its title, my initial reaction to this exhibition was one of curiosity. Read More
Art Deco 1910 - 1939 (VIC) > VIC
With its Bakelite radio, Tamara De Lempicka painting and luxurious dressing table complete with intricate ivory inlays, the opening room of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Art Deco show says it all. Read More
Melbourne Art Fair (VIC) > VIC
With 80 commercial galleries, 10 project spaces, two specially commissioned installations and anticipated sales at the $10.5 million mark, the Melbourne Art Fair isn’t the sort of place to play things down. Read More
Puberty Blues
To stay sane in this world it is sometimes necessary to step back and laugh at the sheer nonsense that follows in the wake of a moral scandal. Read More
Robert Jenyns (NSW) > NSW
Pop psychologists and armchair analysts are masters of the succinct and the obvious. Read More
The enchanted forest: new gothic storytellers (VIC) > VIC
Curiouser and curiouser... a new approach to gothic. Read More
Turn, Turn, Turn: the past talks to the present (NSW) > NSW
Nick Waterlow is the only person to have curated more than one Biennale of Sydney. Read More
VIVID National Photographic Festival (ACT) > ACT
Australian photography festivals are seemingly multiplying at a rapid pace, with VIVID being the latest member to join the growing team. Read More
Daniel Crooks and Jae Hoon Lee (QLD)
By Heidi Maier
Digital media artists Daniel Crooks and Jae Hoon Lee enjoy subverting expectations with their often surreally fascinating creations. For their joint exhibition at Brisbane's Institute of Modern Art (IMA), they push the boundaries of digital art, presenting video installations and digital photographic works which both confound and delight the viewer.
Jae Hoon Lee, who studied at the University of Auckland and San Francisco's Art Institute, now lives in New Zealand and is best known for
creating confronting and quietly provocative large scale installations and still photographic images which use contemporary technology to explore the intricacies of human existence.
Lee's compelling major video installation, One Hundred Faces, consists of what he describes simply as "special maps of skin." Lee spent one year scanning the facial skin of 100 people that he met while out and about in Auckland. The images have been digitally manipulated to create composite forms and pictures. The installation is accompanied by an atmospheric soundtrack, recorded while he travelled in Thailand amidst the transient population of international backpackers who visit Bangkok's Kao-San Road.
One Hundred Faces is a genuinely fascinating work that explores the dialectic between sound and vision by creating what Lee calls "the membrane of a third space" in which a dynamic exchange between time, space and sound takes place. According to Lee, "The images of flesh emphasise transience and face-to-face experience, but the digital manipulation of them also takes them into places of temporal and spatial dislocation. The project is not only about experiencing simulated people in a virtual space but also, by contrasting the audience and the work, real people in real space."
In Lee's video installation, The Leaf, leaves were scanned over 12 months and then digitally threaded together in order to create a continuous vertical stream which evokes the natural growth cycle of plants. The resulting moving images are projected onto five separate plasma screens, each of them presenting the compilations of images in a randomly mixed and unsynchronised manner. Lee hopes that the work will successfully perform the action of what he describes as "mapping a territory" within the gallery space itself, creating a kind of virtual time-lapsed growing tree.
Jae Hoon Lee, Space Tree 1, 2006, digitally collaged photography, 95 x 95cm. Courtesy of the artist and Starkwhite Gallery.
A perpetual tourist who leads what he calls "a nomadic existence", and as a Korean immigrant to New Zealand, Lee considers himself to be a "cultural wanderer" whose "collecting habit" has expanded beyond keeping concrete objects to also include "random situations and happenings, encounters on the street." He is an enthusiastic collector of
images from his everyday life, documenting the places he visits and the people he encounters with a digital camera.
The stuff of everyday life also fascinates and inspires New Zealand-born and Melbourne-based digital artist Daniel Crooks. Artist and curator Julianne Pierce described Crooks's work as, "an alchemical study of time and motion." It is a fitting description. Crooks treats the screen as a space that is both elastic and malleable, using it to manipulate the experience of time and space and also to explore the myriad ways in which the two can be interpreted, reinterpreted and altered.
Crooks has a long standing fascination with time-lapse photography that dates back to his days as a high school student and continues to inform his work. He completed a degree in graphic design in New Zealand before relocating to Melbourne to undertake a graduate diploma in animation at the Victorian College of the Arts.
Since 2003, Crooks has been steadily working on his Imaginary Objects project, parts of which will be on display at the IMA. Talking about some of the images which comprise the project, Crooks admits to a particular interest in "temporal structures" or what he also calls, "objects formed from a chronological series of spatial fragments that cohere across time."
To create his Imaginary Objects series, Crooks uses a custom developed motion control system. Rotating everyday items are recorded using high definition digital video. He then extracts a single pixel slice from each frame and splices them together in sequence to form a complete image. As Crooks explains, "While each video frame records a three dimensional object in two dimensions, the slice effectively extracts just one dimension. When joined together the final image reflects the temporal flow as one reads across the slices; the two dimensions of the image plane represent space and time respectively."
Both Crooks and Lee are artists who are clearly intrigued by the possibilities inherent in digital technologies and the ways in which various kinds of life imagery, from a scan of human skin to a single geometric strand, might be cleverly manipulated and reconfigured using something that is, these days, itself as simple and everyday as a digital camera, scanner or basic computer software.
Jae Hoon Lee, Becoming (Self Portrait), 2002, digitally collaged photography, 100 x 66 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Starkwhite Gallery.
Institute of Modern Art
31 May to 21 June 2008
Heidi Maier is a Brisbane-based freelance writer and reviewer.
