Michael Cook May Exhibitions

At dianne tanzer gallery + projects Michael Cook's latest series entitled The Mission is exhibited until June 9. He is also included in the National Gallery of Australia's National Indigenous Art Triennial which opened last night.

The Mission is a series of ten works, documenting the journey of an Indigenous woman from her home to the mission and the changes that are wrought. Set up as a sort of terrifying institutional bulwark against genocidal colonization, the missions were state administered locations of supposed stafety and support of Aboriginals. The missions themselves echo the power dynamics at play in Cook's work; exterior forces model and remake as they feel, squeezing culture and identity into policy and historical narrative. (Shae Nagorcka)

Click here to view The Mission exhibition.

Michael Cook at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra with Broken Dreams & Undiscovered, 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial.

From May to July 2012, the National Gallery will celebrate the second National Indigenous Art Triennial, unDisclosed. Until July 22 visitors to the National Gallery will have the opportunity to experience the visual expression of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. 20 artists have been selected for their commitment to excellence and their daring to explore new fields of practice and artistic vision. These artists both inform and redefine contemporary Indigenous art as we presently know it.

The exhibition’s theme, ‘unDisclosed’, alludes to the spoken and the unspoken, the known and the unknown, what can be revealed and what cannot. It captures the duality of the disclosed and undisclosed embedded within the works and the exhibition as a whole. Viewers are invited to unearth the layers of hidden and subtle meanings and to place them alongside those that are conspicuous.

unDisclosed will be touring nationally in 2013, opening at the Cairns Regional Gallery, Cairns QLD, on 22 February 2013 before travelling to South Australia to the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, at the University of South Australian, Adelaide SA, opening on 3 May 2013.

Michael Cook's Undiscovered at the National Gallery of Australia as a part of unDisclosed: the 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial.