Michael Cook is an award-winning photographer who worked commercially in Australia and overseas for twenty-five years. In 2009, Cook began to make art photography, driven by an increasingly urgent desire to explore issues of identity. His photographic series are unique in their approach, and evocatively recreate incidents from Australian colonial history, uniting the historical with the imaginary, the political with the personal. Most recently, the settings for his tableau have allowed for sumptuous and intriguing explorations which speak to a universal experience of dispossession and displacement. Visually striking, technically complex and with sensitive invention, they occupy a new space in the artistic imagination.
Read MoreCook’s art career has been on a steady upward trajectory since his first art series, Through My Eyes (2010), was selected for the Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards (2011). Since then, every series of work he has produced has been included in major Australian and internationally recognised exhibitions. His series Object (2015) was shown during the 2015 Venice Biennale as part of Personal Structures: Crossing Borders at Palazzo Mora. Also in 2015 his work was part of a major exhibition at the British Museum, Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation. Other significant exhibitions include ‘Mother’, Art Basel Hong Kong (2016), the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014) and the 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Brisbane, 2013).
Text courtesy THIS IS NO FANTASY.