Summary

About the Artwork

This series is about a conversation… These images speculate about Aboriginal people being in the majority— what if Aboriginal people were 96 per cent of the Australian population and white people defined as the four percent?

Majority Rule, the latest collection from photographer Michael Cook, demonstrates his move into new artistic territory. These works are a departure from his previous style and aesthetic and uses images to pose a direct question. He asks the viewer to speculate about an Australia where Aboriginal people are the majority.

Touching on the discriminatory nature of society, Cook uses the same Indigenous man multiplied over and over in each image to communicate his message and paint a picture of a societal structure reversed. The numerous versions of the Aboriginal subject populate generic city locations: a train station tunnel, a vintage bus, iconic monuments, and various city streets. Cook's imagery challenges our ingrained belief systems, yet these images do not offer judgment - they are observational, asking questions without proffering any neat prescriptive conclusions.

Cook's interest in the impact of Australia's history on its original inhabitants comes into sharp focus with this series of heavily and intentionally choreographed images. It is a defining moment for a photographer who doesn’t shy away from investigation, both of self and of society.

Artist Biography:

Michael Cook is an award-winning photographer who has worked commercially for twenty-five years, in Australia and internationally. Cook was drawn into art photography in 2009 by an increasingly urgent desire to learn about his Indigenous ancestry and explore that aspect of his identity.

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.

Cook's photographic practice is unusual. He constructs his images in a manner more akin to painting than the traditional photographic studio or documentary model. Instead, he begins with an idea, regarding the image as his blank canvas. Photographic layering is then used to build the image to provide aesthetic depth. Also, he characteristically works in photographic series. Unfolding tableaux offer enigmatic narratives which are not prescribed but left open to interpretation.

His Aboriginal heritage informs and extends his art. Cook's first solo art exhibition, Through My Eyes (2010), contained images of Australian prime ministers overlaid with the faces of Australian Indigenes. This work explored the potential interconnectedness of generations of Australians and its importance was recognised with selection for the Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards 2011 at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Cook was adopted and brought up in a family who, while not of Indigenous descent, were heavily involved in supporting Indigenous rights. He said, "I was raised with a strong understanding of my Aboriginal ancestry thanks to my parents... When I produce art, I feel a stronger connection with my ancestry. This helps me to understand Australian history-in particular, my history."

Cook's career has been on an upward trajectory since the launch of his first art series. His photographs are represented 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.