Michael Cook is an Australian art photographer who was born in 1968. He worked commercially in Australia and overseas for 25 years before he began to make art photography in 2009, driven by an increasingly urgent desire to explore issues of identity. He is of mixed ancestry – some of which is Indigenous – and works from an Australian base.
His photographic series are unique in their approach, evocatively recreating incidents that emerge from colonial history. His images unite the historical with the imaginary, the political with the personal.
Images are unusual in their construction, created in a manner more akin to painting than the traditional photographic studio or documentary model. He begins with an idea, using photographic layering to build the image to provide aesthetic depth and each series explores an enigmatic narrative. While his earliest work was set in the Australian outback or beach environments, new series’, such as Object (2015), speak to a European cultural heritage and a universal experience of dispossession and displacement.
Cook’s career has been on an upward trajectory since the launch of his first art series, Through My Eyes (2010). Since then, his work has been included in major exhibitions all over the world. These include the 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Brisbane, 2013) and 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014). His series, Object (2015) was shown at the 2015 Venice Biennale as part of Personal Structures: Crossing Borders at Palazzo Mora. In 2015, his work was part of Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation at the British Museum.
His work was also included in Lifelines: Indigenous Contemporary Art from Australia, curated by the Musées de la Civilisation in Québec, Canada and Artist and Empire: (En)countering Colonial Legacies, Tate/National Gallery Singapore, Singapore (both 2016). It was also part of Taba Naba: Australie, Océanie, arts des peuples de la mer, at the Musée Océanographique de Monaco in 2016.
In 2020, Cook was selected for Paris Photo New York with Livin’ the Dream (before the art fair was cancelled due to COVID-19). His first major survey exhibition, Michael Cook: Undiscovered was launched in 2020 with a hardcover monograph at the Art Gallery of the new University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland.
Cook’s photographs are represented is in all major Australian collections and in significant international collections including the British Museum, London, The Museum of World Cultures, Netherlands, Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Utrecht, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, USA.
Visually striking, technically complex and sensitively inventive, Cook’s images occupy a new space in the artistic imagination and are featured in publications all over the world.
www.michaelcook.net.au
Click the link to see the entire impressive judging panel for Australasia's Top Emerging Photographers 2021: www.capturemag.com.au/news/australasia-s-top-emerging-photographers-2021-meet-our-all-star-judging-panel