Michael Cook employs the camera as the supreme intermediary device – the ‘third eye’ which can bridge European and Indigenous worlds and perspectives. The photography is, for Cook, that imaginary place of possibility where we can be invited to experience the other side of the coin, roles in reversal, worlds inverted, histories re-written. What would it be like to take your part? To walk in your shoes? To see through your eyes? There is a playful innocence and palpable joy in Cook’s speculations and specularisations (ego projections) evocative of dressing up, make-believe, and telling tales. Images are elaborately crafted with sumptuous detail and a seductive power to transport.

Cook’s fantastic works, where past, present and future collide, are home to both vast chasms of disparity and intense points of connection. The images promise imaginative pathways through minefields of associations, as we sense potential unravellings of historical consequence. Enticed into fictional scenarios, viewers are free to make their own inquiries, explore feelings, and test their relationship to aspects of Australia’s colonial history. While always knowing he is Aboriginal but perhaps never feeling Aboriginal, Cook has made artworks that are complex and entangled, often provocative and sometimes preposterous, but always driven by empathy and openness.

Conditioned draws upon key series from the last decade to prise open histories and imaginaries that simmer between Indigenous and European experiences, perspectives, and consciousness.
Cook works in an almost cinematic mode, using the camera as an elaborate choreographic and narrative device, meticulously layering and editing his images from countless shoots on location. The resulting images are quietly virtuosic. Soft, painterly tones and fastidious compositional details provide a filmic backdrop for historical pathos, speculative futures, imaginary leaps, and unrestrained what-ifs. They veer between the sumptuous and the stark, the historical and the speculative, the political and the playful.
Amidst Conditioned’s lushly printed plates – which are punctuated by abstracted texts and phraseology – Cook invites us on a kaleidoscopic trip through Indigenous parliamentary takeovers, luxury European shopping sprees, autobiographic asides, and colonial inversions – where Aboriginal characters assume the role of alien invaders, and supersized Australian wildlife wreak havoc upon iconic London streets. It is a journey of reflection, resistance, and freewheeling imagination.