Derek Kreckler (b. 1952, Australia) works in performance, video, sound and photography. His work is concerned with the present-time re-staging and re-imagining of historical events, with a particular interest in the 20th century avant-garde project.
Derek participated in a MAAP artist-in-residence project in Brisbane, August 2013. The Australian artist is developing a series of new works for MAAP’s upcoming major touring exhibition ‘Land-Sea-Sky: Video Space’, which will visit China, South Korea and Australia in 2014. His intensive period of experimentation during the residency, which began in early 2013, culminated in a one night only public presentation at MAAP SPACE 30th August 2013.
The starting point for his video and photograph installation Untitled (2013), was a photograph by George Mortimer called Big Wave Hunting. George was a relative of FJ Mortimer a prominent English photographer during the late 19th and early 20th century. FJ Mortimer’s photography exemplifies the ‘Pictorial’ movement of photography. Derek’s photograph sees the artist as the subject armed with a 35mm camera, precariously perched on a rock shelf as a large wave crashes onto the nearby rocks. The accompanying video of tumbling waves, projected on a screen sliced like vertical blinds and blown by an oscillating fan, is a counterpoint to the still image’s sense of frozen time. With the light of the projection periodically exceeding the screen surface to create sculptural presence in the gallery space, Derek takes delight the combined randomness of the waves crashing and the unexpected transgressions of the video.
Derek’s assistant, Jenny Chubby, actively participated in the residency project. Jenny, an emerging artist, also shot several video pieces for her own practice while in Brisbane.
Derek has been exhibiting since the late 1970s internationally and throughout Australia including the Biennale of Sydney 1982, 1990, 2004; PSI, New York, 1992; National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, 2003; the Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art, 2004; RADIALSYSTEMd, Visual Dramaturgy, Berlin, 2013.
