Conditioned
Michael Cook
Perimeter Editions
English
Edited by Dan Rule
Softcover with Swiss binding
First Edition
Edition of 800
144 pages
240 x 290 mm
2025
ISBN 9781922545466
For Michael Cook, photography is a means of reimagining and rewriting. His language is embedded in questions of what was, what is, what might have been, and what could be. Conditioned, the Bidjara artist’s first book for Perimeter Editions, 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.
About the Artist
Michael Cook employs the camera as the supreme intermediary device – the ‘third eye’ which can bridge European and Indigenous worlds and perspectives. The photograph 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. Michael Cook was adopted at birth into a non-Indigenous family. While cut off from the connection to his biological and social Aboriginal heritage, he was fortunate enough to have an adoptive mother who embraced his Aboriginality and empowered him to imagine what that might mean for him and for the world he lived in. Michael’s adoptive mother was a passionate social worker and activist, involved in fighting for Aboriginal rights and environmental causes, including the Fraser Island Defence Organisation. Her passion for social justice and her deep empathy for Aboriginal people inform the foundation of Michael Cook’s practice. Michael Cook won the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award and the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography People’s Choice Award and was also a finalist in the Bowness Photography Prize. His artworks are held 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, LA County Museum of Art, LA, and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, USA.
https://www.michaelcook.net.au/
(Source: https://www.michaelcook.net.au/biography)
About the Publisher
Perimeter Editions is the award-winning publishing imprint of Melbourne-based bookstore Perimeter Books and distribution house Perimeter Distribution. Releasing its first publication in 2012, Perimeter Editions’ focus rests on publishing autonomous books in close collaboration with photographers, artists, curators and writers. Its publications exhibit a criticality and sensitivity to content and form.
