London calling – for a photo finish
While he once invaded the British capital with giant Australian fauna and Indigenous Fembots, artist/photographer Michael Cook’s latest London foray is more thoughtful – but no less crazy.
It’s somewhat ironic that Queensland artist Michael Cook often uses London as the backdrop to his fantastical works. His photographic montages – shot on location and later fashioned in a studio with cast and crew like a mini-movie set – are like nothing else in the Australian art world.
And who can forget his Invasion series when he wreaked havoc on the British capital with giant marauding Australian fauna and Indigenous Fembots.
Wild wild stuff.
His current exhibition series, Individuation, is a little more serious and introspective, subject wise. Although it is as also cinematic as usual. It is now showing at Jan Murphy Gallery in Fortitude Valley and also this week at the Melbourne Art fair.
Chatting to Cook before his departure for Melbourne he expressed a kind of love for London even though he has mixed feelings. Why?
“Because of our colonisation,” he says. Of course. Anyone with an Indigenous heritage would be conflicted. Luckily Cook, a former fashion and wedding photographer, has been able to channel his ambiguity regarding our British colonial background into some of the most thought-provoking art in the history of contemporary Australian art.
He has used his considerable skill to create aesthetically pleasing imagery that interrogates our social and cultural history. For him this is a personal odyssey in art, as writer Louise Martin-Chew points out in her catalogue essay for this show.
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“In many ways this body of work brings his artistic direction over the last ten years into a closer alignment than ever before with his biography,” Martin-Chew writes. “Adopted as a baby into a white family, he learnt, as he grew, to use fashion to mask his visual ‘difference’.
Now in mid-life, Cook’s interest in what he and other people need to thrive – community, family and connection – sees an acknowledgment of the corrosive societal conditioning which constantly prompts us toward material objects and the status meted out by them.
“Photography has often been used to bear witness; in this series Cook winds his narrative through the contemporary challenges we face, noting in our ‘progress’ the growing contrasts between modern societies and the authentic connections observed in indigenous communities by the colonists on their arrival to the Australian continent two hundred years ago.”
Cook admits this was his most difficult series yet. Possibly because it so personal.
“Jan Murphy said it felt like I was closing the door on a 10-year journey,” Cook says. “I faced a lot of the shadows and got over my fear of looking at my own emotions. I feel like I’ve got to a stage where I don’t take life so seriously.”
There is, however, serious intent in these amazingly cinematic collages that feature, as the star, the recurring and (to Cook fans) familiar figure of Indigenous man Joey Gala, Cook’s friend. Joey is the Everyman whose journey is mapped out in these works, beginning on country with a work entitled Acceptance, then going through the material world on a journey to London and ending up back on country in a work entitled Authenticity.
Authenticity, 2024-25, archival pigment print.
Acceptance, 2024-25, archival pigment print.
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Conformity, 2024-25, archival pigment print.
There are the usual flashes of humour in the works including a little cameo by King Charles who appears, in miniature, peeking out a window of Buckingham Palace in Narcissism.
“King Charles was an afterthought, but I put him in because I met him once when I was in an exhibition at the British Museum,” Cook says. “We all lined up and shook his hand and we had a chat.”
Cook himself appears in one work, Attachment. He’s the little figure standing looking a bit lonely on the end of a pier by the River Thames while Joey sunbathes on a gritty beach nearby.
There is a lot going on in these works and Cook urges viewers to stand in front of them for a while to soak it all in and try to work out exactly what is happening in what amounts to a kind of visual spiritual odyssey.
“He steps off country to be accepted in western society, he goes through white society and experiences it all only to get to midlife to realise his own authenticity,” Cook says. “The whole story is about my life, me coming to the realisation of wanting a deeper meaning than the one we are conditioned to believe in. We get to midlife and question what our reality is.”
Cook uses materialistic motifs along the way including fashion names such as Balenciaga and, in particular, in this series, The Balenciaga potato chip bag, a handbag designed to look like a plastic bag of potato chips. True story. He has a bit of fun with that idea.
His next series might be simpler, he says, because shooting the backgrounds for his large works and arranging the studio shoots to fill in the stories is an exhausting and complicated process.
Cook burst onto the art scene in 2008 winning a Deadly Award for Visual Artist of the Year. Since then he has made a name for himself, with his work collected by all the major Australian galleries. He has exhibited widely internationally including at the British Museum and, among many other venues, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Cook has explored Australian history from the first arrival of Europeans and even once portrayed Australian prime ministers with their faces overlaid with Aboriginal visages. He is daring, inventive and has an eye for aesthetics that make his works often beautiful as well as compelling.
Works from the Individuation series are available in three sizes with prices from $8800 for the smaller works, $13,500 for the medium works and $21,000 for the larger ones. They are sold in limited edition batches. No doubt some major galleries will be zeroing in on them.
These current works are all beautifully realised – funny and thoughtful, never bitter. And his journey is our journey, too, as we all live in the material world.
Michael Cook’s Individuation, Melbourne Art Fair, February 20-23 and Jan Murphy Gallery, Fortitude Valley, until March 15.