Cook, Michael. 2017. Invasion (UFO Possums). Ink jet print on paper. Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria, Australia.
Photograph by Elizabeth Cole of Michael Cook's work Invasion (UFO Possums), 2023.
This work was shown with others from Michael Cook’s Invasion series 2017, in the foyer area of the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery. I visited the gallery on 27 August 2023 to see another exhibition and had not encountered Cook’s work before. However the six large-scale, filmic works captured my imagination, especially this work with its iconic allusion to science fiction movies. Attesting to the theory of Susanne Langer that work can present as a symbol in its entirety (Adrienne Dengerink 2005, 194), I was distracted by the incongruity of possums as alien attackers before realizing the work’s symbolic references to post colonialism. Many days later I realised a link between this series and the work of the Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour, who uses absurd situations to highlight the plight of Palestinian people. The trigger was her Space Exodus series 2009, in which Sansour featured as a Palestinian astronaut (Gabsi 2010).
From both Cook and Sansour’s work I reflect on the use of humour and absurdity as a way of dismantling the viewer’s indifference or blindness to potentially unpalatable messages, a useful lesson as I seek to address climate change in my work.
Bibliography:
Adrienne Dengerink, Chaplin. 2005. Art and Embodiment: Biological and Phenomenological Contributions to Understanding Beauty and the Aesthetic. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library.
Gabsi, Wafa. 2010. "‘Fiction and Art practice’Interview with Larissa Sansour ‘A Space Exodus.’." Contemporary Practices: Visual Arts from the Middle East 10.
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